Active disturbance rejected predictive functional control for space vehicles with RCS

Reaction control system (RCS) is a powerful and efficient actuator for space vehicles attitude control, which is typically characterized as a pulsed unilateral effector only with two states (off/on). Along with inevitable internal uncertainties and external disturbances in practice, this inherent nonlinear character always hinders space vehicles autopilot from pursuing precise tracking performance. Compared to most of pre-existing methodologies that passively suppress the uncertainties and disturbances, a design based on predictive functional control (PFC) and generalized extended state observer (GESO) is firstly proposed for three-axis RCS control system to actively reject that with no requirement for additional fuel consumption. To obtain a high fidelity predictive model on which the performance of PFC greatly depends, the nonlinear coupling multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) flight dynamics model is parameterized as a state-dependent coefficient form. And based on that, a MIMO PFC algorithm in state space domain for a plant of arbitrary orders is deduced in this paper. The internal uncertainties and external disturbances are lumped as a total disturbance, which is estimated and cancelled timely to further enhance the robustness. The continuous control command synthesised by above controller-rejector tandem is finally modulated by pulse width pulse frequency modulator (PWPF) to on-off signals to meet RCS requirement. The robustness and feasibility of the proposed design are validated by a series of performance comparison simulations with some prominent methods in the presence of significant perturbations and disturbances, as well as measurement noise.