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In this article, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) scheme is proposed for the electromagnetic docking of spacecraft in the presence of time-varying delay, fault signals, external disturbances, and elliptical eccentricity. By introducing an auxiliary variable, an intermediate observer (IO) is presented to estimate the relative motion information and the total disturbance resulting from fault signals, unknown mass, external disturbances, and elliptical eccentricity. Then, an ADRC scheme is developed to guarantee that the relative position, relative velocity, and the estimation errors of relative motion information and the total disturbance can all converge into the neighborhood of the equilibrium. With the proposed control scheme, the time-delay factor is fully considered in the controller design to avoid adverse effect, and the uniform ultimate boundedness stability of the entire closed-loop system is analyzed with a rigorous theoretical proof. In comparison to conventional ADRC and other state-of-the-art schemes, the proposed ADRC scheme has several advantages, e.g., high accuracy, strong robustness, and requires no prior knowledge of the fault, time-varying delay and states information due to IO-based relative motion information and total disturbance estimations. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

This paper studies the problem of attitude stabilization for a rigid spacecraft subject to external disturbances, time-varying inertia uncertainties, and input magnitude and rate constraints (MRCs). By analyzing the influence of inertia uncertainties, the reconstruction of lumped disturbances is accomplished to facilitate the controller design. Then, a disturbance observer is designed, based on which, a simple state feedback control strategy including estimation of lumped disturbances is proposed. By choosing new state variables using attitude information and estimation errors, an augmented plant is constructed. Using standard Lyapunov stability analysis, which shows that all states are uniformly ultimately bounded, sufficient conditions for the existence of the disturbance observer and controller are given based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). It is worth pointing out that the observer and controller gains are obtained simultaneously. It is shown that the control scheme developed is not only robust against external disturbances and unknown time-varying inertia uncertainties, but also able to steer the attitude control performance and estimation errors of lumped disturbances. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

This paper addresses the control problem of spacecraft electromagnetic docking in the presence of external disturbances, fault signals, elliptical eccentricity, and input magnitude and rate constraints (MRCs). More specifically, the dynamic model of translational motion in an elliptical orbit is derived first; by analyzing the influence of external disturbances, fault signals and elliptical eccentricity, a lumped disturbance is reconstructed to facilitate the controller design. Then, a state feedback control strategy based on disturbance observer, i.e. a disturbance observer-based controller (DOBC), is proposed, where the compensation of the lumped disturbance is considered. This controller thus has the nature of fault tolerance and robustness, and it requires no mass information on chaser or target spacecraft, no information on external disturbances, fault signals or even orbital elements except for semi-major axis. By choosing new state variables using the information on relative motion and estimation errors, an augmented plant is established. Using Lyapunov stability analysis, which shows that all states are uniformly ultimately bounded, sufficient conditions for the existence of the disturbance observer and controller subject to input MRCs are given based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the validity and performance of the proposed strategy.

This paper addresses the attitude stabilization and vibration suppression problem for flexible spacecraft subject to model parameter uncertainty, controller perturbations, external disturbances and input constraints. The attitude model of flexible spacecraft is described and converted into a state space form in terms of passive and active vibration suppression schemes. A novel state feedback controller is proposed based on the exactly available expectation of a new variable, which is introduced to model a randomly occurring controller gain perturbation. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, sufficient conditions for the existence of the nonfragile H∞ controller considering input constraints are given based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) in terms of additive perturbation and multiplicative perturbation. Then, the developed controller subject to required constraints can be obtained, where the nonfragile property is fully considered to improve the tolerance to uncertainties in the controller. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control strategy in attitude stabilization and vibration suppression, where it should be noted that the passive vibration suppression scheme is superior for high natural frequencies while the active vibration suppression scheme is superior for low natural frequencies. Moreover, the low natural frequencies have more influence on the performance of attitude stabilization and vibration suppression.

The observer-based fault tolerant attitude control problem for spacecraft is addressed, wherein the constraints of H∞ performance, quadratic stability, model parameter uncertainty, measurement errors, external disturbances, controller perturbation, and actuator fault and saturation are considered simultaneously. A novel fault estimation approach is proposed, where a stochastically intermediate variable is introduced. Based on the exactly available expectation of such a variable, a new kind of intermediate observer is proposed to estimate the attitude information and fault signals simultaneously. Compared with the traditional fault estimation methods, the approach proposed in this paper is less conservative for it requires neither equation constraints nor observer matching condition and can tolerate stochastic failure. To achieve fault tolerant and nonfragile control performance, the estimation of fault signals and explicit controller perturbation are also exploited in the controller design. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, sufficient conditions for the existence of the observer-based fault tolerant nonfragile H∞ controller are given based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) in terms of additive perturbation and multiplicative perturbation. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and also illustrate the advantage over the existing state feedback control method in terms of great reduction in energy consumption.

Electromagnetic docking could enable autonomous spacecraft docking with no need for propellant consumption and without plume contamination. This paper addresses the robust electromagnetic docking problem for spacecraft in the presence of external disturbances, fault signals, unknown mass, elliptical eccentricity, measurement errors and input constraints. In this scenario, an intermediate observer is developed to estimate the relative motion information and the lumped disturbance resulting from these uncertainties. Based on this, an anti-disturbance controller is proposed, where the compensation of the lumped disturbance is considered. It is proved via Lyapunov analysis that the intermediate observer-based controller can achieve the objective of spacecraft electromagnetic docking with input constraints and in the presence of uncertainties. Finally, the observer-based controller is illustrated, in simulation, to demonstrate the effectiveness and improved performance compared with a disturbance observer-based controller.

A novel improved mixed H2/H∞ control technique combined with poles assignment theory is presented to achieve attitude stabilization and vibration suppression simultaneously for flexible spacecraft in this paper. The flexible spacecraft dynamics system is described and transformed into corresponding state space form. Based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) scheme and poles assignment theory, the improved mixed H2/H∞ controller does not restrict the equivalence of the two Lyapunov variables involved in H2 and H∞ performance, which can reduce conservatives compared with traditional mixed H2/H∞ controller. Moreover, it can eliminate the coupling of Lyapunov matrix variables and system matrices by introducing slack variable that provides additional degree of freedom. Several simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method in this paper.

This paper investigates the robust dynamic output feedback non-fragile control (RDOFNFC) strategy for spacecraft attitude stabilization problem with nonlinear perturbations. The spacecraft attitude dynamics model takes the actuator saturation limits, external disturbances, controller perturbation and model parameter uncertainty into account. To make spacecraft attitude system satisfy H ∞ performance and quadratic stability, with respect to the additive perturbation in initial state and multiplicative perturbation in decay phase, the corresponding RDOFNFC is designed respectively. Based on Lyapunov theory, the controller design is transformed into a multi-objective convex optimization problem based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Simulation results based on the on-orbit servicing spacecraft show good performance under external disturbances, model parameter uncertainty and controller perturbation, which validates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control method.

This paper investigates the robust non-fragile state feedback attitude control problem for uncertain spacecraft, and the problem explored here is subject to H∞ performance constraint, quadratic sta...

A novel model of space electromagnetic docking is established to solve the problem of traditional plume contamination and short service life in this paper. A new modelling technique regarding space electromagnetic docking for CubeSat is proposed. The mathematical model with four core-containing energized solenoids is derived and simplified to the magnetic dipole far-field model of single-turn coil. Simplifying the magnetic dipole far-field model will yield the model of space electromagnetic docking, and the numerical simulation results also verify the reliability and feasibility of simplification process.