Attitude cooperative control of spacecraft
formation via output-feed back
Yueyong Lv, Qinglei Hu, Guangfu Ma and Jian Zhang
Department of Control Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a decentralized output feedback controller for cooperative attitude regulation of spacecraft
formation in absence of angular velocity feedback.
Design/methodology/approach – The nonlinear relative attitude dynamic and kinematic equations represented by relative quaternion and relative
angular velocity, respectively, are considered in this paper. The lead filter is employed to synthesize virtual angular velocity signal so that the design of
output feedback controller is achieved. Lyapunov method is adopted to prove the stability of closed-loop system. Considering the external disturbance,
the theory of L2-gain disturbance attenuation is employed to improve the designed controller. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the
controllers proposed.
Findings – It is found that the closed-loop system can be guaranteed asymptotically stable in absence of external disturbance. When disturbance is
considered, as long as the sufficient condition proposed is satisfied, the improved controller can render system uniformly ultimately bounded stable.
Practical implications – The proposed output feedback control scheme can be considered as a fall-back alternative for the case that the angular
velocity sensors fail, or seen as another option for the system without angular velocity sensors at all.
Originality/value – Unlike most classical works in the field of output feedback which focus on centralized scheme and neglect the disturbance, the
controller proposed in this paper is able to handle the output feedback control problem of multi-agent formation in a decentralized fashion, so as to
avoid the single failure point of a centralized scheme. Meanwhile, the capability of L2-gain disturbance attenuation is also achieved simultaneously.
Keywords Spacecraft, Controllers, Decentralized output feedback, Cooperative attitude control, Spacecraft formation flying, Attitude regulation,
L2-gain
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Spacecraft formation flying (SFF) has received extensive
interests in recent years (Bristow et al., 2000). By distributing
the functionality of a monolithic complex spacecraft between a
set of more than one smaller and closely flying spacecraft, the
performance of the whole system can be enhanced greatly.
Comparing with spacecraft constellation that is also based on
the distributing concept (Folta et al., 1998), any of the agent
spacecraft dynamic states are coupled together (Scharf et al.,
2004), while the dynamic states of spacecraft constellation are
mutually independent. In order to satisfy the requirement of
formation deployment so that the formation would work as a
virtual monolithic spacecraft, precise relative attitude control is
identified as another key issue as control of relative position.
Furthermore, when specified requirement is made such as
attitude coincident and alignment, it is of particular
significance to promote the research on cooperative attitude
control of SFF.
To implement cooperative attitude control, there are three
main control architectures: Leader-Follower (L-F), behavioral
and virtual structure architectures. The L-F architecture is
the most studied in present literatures, in which the
cooperative attitude control of formation is reduced to an
attitude tracking problem for the follower spacecraft itself
(Wang and Hadaegh, 1996; Wang et al., 1999; Kristiansen,
2009; Bondhus, 2005). Although this reduction could bring
the existing attitude control algorithms for a single spacecraft
to SFF and make the stability analysis easy, the follower is a
single point of fault. Additionally, when the leader spacecraft
rotates too fast for the follower to track, the configuration of
the formation would be difficult to keep due to there is no
explicit feedback from the follower to the leader (Wang et al.,
1999). As an alternative to L-F architecture, the basic idea of
virtual structure architecture is to regard the formation as a
whole virtual space structure, and each formation agent is
controlled individually. Comparing with L-F architecture, the
desired state trajectory is generated by the virtual structure
not a specific spacecraft as in L-F. In Beard et al. (2001) and
Ahn and Kim (2008), the virtual structure scheme was
successfully applied in attitude synchronization. Generally
speaking, the two architectures mentioned above have both
fallen into the category of centralized control. So the problem
of fault sensitive and tracking capability in L-F architecture
still exists in the virtual structure. In order to handle this
problem, explicit feedback was introduced into the virtual
structure (Ren and Beard, 2004a, b), and a cooperative
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1748-8842.htm
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology: An International Journal
84/5 (2012) 321–329
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 1748-8842]
[DOI 10.1108/00022661211255502]
This work was supported by the Scientific Research Foundation for
National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Number:
61,004072, 61,174200), and Program for New Century Excellent
Talents in University (NCET-11-0801). The author fully appreciates the
financial support. The author would also like to thank the reviewers and
the Editor for many suggestions that helped improve the paper.
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