Fault tolerant attitude control of under-actuated spacecraft: Theory and experiment

This paper investigates fault tolerant attitude control theory and experiment for under-actuated spacecraft with one reaction wheel completely broken and two others suffering actuator faults of partial loss of effectiveness or bias. A non-smooth robust adaptive fault tolerant control law is proposed under the zero-momentum and input saturation conditions. It shows that the available reaction wheels need to produce sufficient control torque for the fault tolerance. Such a new control method is implemented in a semi-physical simulation system of an air-bearing platform. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in spacecraft practical engineering.