Achieving Precisely-Assigned Performance Requirements for Spacecraft Attitude Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel control scheme for spacecraft attitude control that guarantees precise performance criteria such as settling time, error, and overshoot, using a combination of reference functions, control barrier functions, and backstepping.

Contribution

The paper proposes the Precisely-Assigned Performance (PAP) control scheme, integrating reference performance functions, control barrier functions, and disturbance observers for guaranteed spacecraft attitude control.

Findings

The proposed controller guarantees convergence within a finite time.

The method effectively handles disturbances and perturbations.

Numerical simulations validate the control scheme's effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper investigates the attitude control problem of spacecraft, with the objective of achieving precise performance criteria including precise settling time, steady-state error, and overshoot elimination. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Precisely-Assigned Performance (PAP) control scheme. Firstly, we utilize a parameterized function to explicitly characterize a reference for the transient responses, termed the Reference Performance Function (RPF). Subsequently, leveraging the concept of the RPF, we define a performance-satisfied tube region and introduce the concept of control barrier functions to derive a sufficient condition for the state trajectory to converge and remain confined within this tube region. By introducing the concept of Sontag's universal formula for stabilization, a PAP controller, constructed based on the backstepping method, is then designed to guide the system to satisfy these affine constraint conditions, and a disturbance observer is further integrated to handle perturbations. Theoretical proofs are presented to demonstrate the controller's capability to establish the boundedness of the overall system and ensure that each state trajectory will converge into the performance-satisfied region within a finite time duration under any conditions. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.