Output attitude tracking for flexible spacecraft

In this work a class of nonlinear controllers has been derived for spacecraft with flexible appendages. The control aim is to track a given desired attitude. First, a static controller based on the measure of the whole state is determined. Then, a dynamic controller is designed; this controller does not use measures from the modal variables, and the variables measured are the parameters describing the attitude and the spacecraft angular velocity. Finally, it is shown that a relaxed version of the tracking problem can be solved when the only measured variable is the spacecraft angular velocity. Simulations show the performances of such control schemes. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.