This paper examines the velocity-free attitude stabilization of an underactuated nadir-pointing rigid spacecraft in a circular orbit in the presence of time-varying disturbances. A nonlinear observer is used to estimate the angular velocity of the spacecraft to complete an output feedback control law. A sliding-mode control strategy is proposed for this stabilization problem in conjunction with a nonlinear observer. The local ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system is rigorously proven. Numerical examples demonstrate the performance of the controller in the presence of time-varying disturbances, nonzero orbital eccentricity, inertia matrix uncertainties, and measurement noise in a sampled data implementation. In particular, even though the theoretical ultimate boundedness guarantees are local, the numerical examples demonstrate ultimate boundedness with large initial attitude errors.


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    Title :

    Velocity-Free Attitude Stabilization of a Nadir-Pointing Underactuated Rigid Spacecraft


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2017-12-29


    Size :

    15 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English