Fault tolerant small satellite attitude control using adaptive non-singular terminal sliding mode

The Attitude Control System (ACS) plays a pivotal role in the whole performance of the spacecraft on the orbit; therefore, it is vitally important to design the control system with the performance of rapid response, high control precision and insensitive to external perturbations. In the first place, this paper proposes two adaptive nonlinear control algorithms based on the sliding mode control (SMC), which are designed for small satellite attitude control system. The nonlinear dynamics describing the attitude of small satellite is considered in a circle reference orbit, and the stability of the closed-loop system in the presence of external perturbations is investigated. Then, in order to account for accidental or degradation fault in satellite actuators, the fault-tolerant control schemes are presented. Hence, two adaptive fault-tolerant control laws (continuous sliding mode control and non-singular terminal sliding mode control) are developed by adopting the nonlinear analytical model to describe the system, which can guarantee global asymptotic convergence of the attitude control error with the existence of unknown external perturbations. The nonlinear hyperplane based Terminal sliding mode is introduced into the control law design; therefore, the system convergence performance improves and the control error is convergent in “finite time”. As a result, the study on the non-singular terminal sliding mode control is the emphasis and the continuous sliding mode control is used to compare with the non-singular terminal sliding mode control. Meanwhile, an adaptive fuzzy algorithm has been proposed to suppress the chattering phenomenon. Moreover, several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed controllers by correcting for the external perturbations. Simulation results confirm that the suggested methodologies yield high control precision in control. In addition, actuator degradation, actuator stuck and actuator failure for a period of time are simulated to demonstrate the fault recovery capability of the fault tolerant controllers. The numerical results clearly demonstrate the good performance of the adaptive non-singular terminal control in the event of actuator fault compare with the continuous sliding mode control.