Robust Nonlinear Spacecraft Attitude Control: An Incremental Backstepping Approach

In order to meet requirements in terms of robustness, stability, and performance for future generations of advanced attitude control systems, a sensor-based approach using Incremental Backstepping control is developed and proposed in this thesis. Assuming full state availability and fast control action, the resulting time-scale separation between the state of the system and the state of the controller allows to consider an incremental form of the attitude dynamics, where backstepping controllers can be designed to achieve stability and convergence with incremental inputs. This results in integral-control action where information of angular acceleration and actuator output measurements is required. The robustness and the full potential of Incremental Backstepping are evidenced in face of external disturbances, uncertainties, and unknown parameters. External disturbances are well suppressed in contrast with conventional backstepping and Lyapunov-based (non)linear controllers. Furthermore, the attitude stabilization results to be insensitive to parametric uncertainties and robust against model uncertainties. However, this comes at the expense of higher control effort. Moreover, with the influence of model and parametric uncertainties the resulting closed-loop dynamic performance can be better accounted for by studying the convergence and stability properties in terms of Lyapunov theory. This methodology results in a simple, yet effective, family of robust nonlinear attitude controllers which aims to meet demanding requirements in terms of robustness, stability and performance, which in turn, close the gap towards the development of future advanced attitude control systems.

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