High-Performance Adaptive Attitude Control of Spacecraft With Sliding Mode Disturbance Observer

A new disturbance observer-based control method is presented in this paper to address the attitude tracking problem of rigid-body spacecraft in the presence of external disturbances and parameter uncertainties. Particularly, a sliding mode disturbance observer (SMDO) is designed. The most important feature of this SMDO is the relaxation of the assumption that external disturbances must be constants or changing at a slow rate, which is a typical assumption required in these classes of problems concerning disturbance observer (DO) design but hard to guarantee from the standpoint of practical engineering. In addition, a special adaptive integral sliding mode controller is combined with the SMDO to ensure system state convergence. The proposed control scheme’s primary advantage is the enhanced robustness against system parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. Stringent closed-loop system stability analysis is performed using Lyapunov-based stability theory. Numerical simulations are carried out on nonlinear model of spacecraft to validate the proposed control scheme’s efficiency compared to the existing methods in the literature.