Feedback control for planar maneuvers of an aerospace vehicle with an unactuated internal degree of freedom

We study feedback control laws that enable an aerospace vehicle to perform planar maneuvers. We make several key assumptions including: (1) maneuvers are planar, (2) a complete set of vehicle control forces and moments is available, (3) the vehicle is a rigid body with a single unactuated internal degree of freedom. The control objective is to design a feedback controller so that the controlled vehicle accomplishes a given planar maneuver, that is a change in the translational velocity vector and the attitude of the vehicle, while rapidly attenuating any relative motion of the internal degree of freedom. A time-invariant discontinuous feedback law is constructed that achieves these control objectives with exponential convergence rates. The effectiveness of the proposed feedback law is illustrated through a simulation example.