ESO-based event-triggered attitude control of spacecraft with unknown actuator faults

An event-triggered control strategy based on extended state observer (ESO) is proposed for the attitude tracking problem of small plug-and-play spacecraft with uncertain inertia parameters, external disturbances, and actuator faults. A simplified controller is developed based on the angular velocity and the general disturbances estimated by the provided ESO using the information of the system inputs and the angular velocities. In the designed event-triggered sampling mechanism, a state-dependent event-triggered strategy determines the triggering instant of the controller to reduce the frequency of information transmission between the controller and the actuator. In comparison with the previous literature, this paper considers uncertain inertia parameters, external disturbances, and actuator faults as general disturbances estimated by ESO, especially for the actuator faults. The inputs of ESO are the error of the angular velocities, which can simplify the controller design. Moreover, the designed ESO can effectively attenuate the influence of measured noises generated by the gyroscopes. The proposed event-triggered policy balances the performance of event-triggering and the control stability performance, which reduces the final state convergence regions without increasing more triggering times compared to existing studies. Furthermore, the investigated policy achieves Zeno-free triggering. Numerical simulations verify theoretical results.