Robust maneuver control and vibration suppression of flexible spacecraft with unknown disturbance and uncertainty

In order to meet the requirement of rapid attitude maneuver control and vibration suppression of flexible spacecraft with disturbance and uncertainty, this paper presents a robust control scheme based on path planning and adaptive backstepping control. Firstly, a novel path planning scheme is proposed based on quintic polynomial transition. The continuous and smooth maneuver path is designed to solve the conflict between swiftness and overshoot in traditional path planning methods as well as to suppress the vibration of flexible appendages. By planning the desired angular acceleration of the maneuver path, appendages' vibration induced by attitude maneuver is decreased effectively. Furthermore, an adaptive robust controller is derived using the backstepping technique, including an adaptation mechanism to estimate the unknown disturbances and uncertainties so that the prior knowledge of the upper bounds on the total disturbance is not necessary for the controller design. Finally, the illustrative simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control scheme.