Event-triggered backstepping control for attitude stabilization of spacecraft

To decrease the communication frequency between the controller and the actuator, this paper addresses the spacecraft attitude control problem by adopting the event-triggered strategy. First of all, a backstepping-based inverse optimal attitude control law is proposed, where both the virtual control law and the actual control law are respectively optimal with respect to certain cost functionals. Then, an event-triggered scheme is proposed to realize the obtained inverse optimal attitude control law. By designing the event triggering mechanism elaborately, it is guaranteed that the trivial solution of the closed-loop system is globally exponentially stable and there is no Zeno phenomenon in the closed-loop system. Further, the obtained event-triggered attitude control law is modified and extended to the more general case when the disturbance torque cannot be ignored. It is proved that all states of the closed-loop system are bounded, the attitude error can be made arbitrarily small ultimately by choosing appropriate design parameters and the Zeno phenomenon is excluded in the closed-loop system. In the proposed event-triggered attitude control approaches, the control signal transmitted from the controller to the actuator is only updated at the triggered time instant when the accumulated error exceeds the threshold defined elaborately. Simulation results show that by using the proposed event-triggered attitude control approach, the communication burden can be significantly reduced compared with the traditional spacecraft control schemes realized in the time-triggered way. (C) 2019 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.