Advanced UAV Aerodynamics, Flight Stability and Control

19Adaptive Fault‐tolerant Attitude Control for Spacecraft Under Loss of Actuator Effectiveness

Qinglei Hu¹, Bing Xiao¹, Bo Li¹ and Youmin Zhang²

¹Department of Control Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

²Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

19.1 Introduction

Accurate and reliable control law design for orbital vehicles is a major challenge for designers. Considerable research has been undertaken into designing spacecraft attitude controllers that will function in the presence of the uncertainties and external disturbances that the system will encounter in operation, to guarantee high performance, such as optimal control [1, 2], sliding mode control [3], adaptive and robust control [4, 5] and so on. However, during operations, it is possible that the system becomes abnormal, for instance due to the ageing of components, or actuator and sensor failures. This may result in substantial performance deterioration and even system instability. Fortunately, fault‐tolerant control is an effective control strategy is applicable to a large class of subsystem and component faults or failures, giving good performance and with reliability guaranteed for fault‐free systems as well as for faulty systems. Researchers in the system control community have proposed a number of methods of fault‐tolerant control [6, 7 and references therein]. Specific fault‐tolerant control schemes are also covered in ...