Active vibration suppression and attitude tracking for flexible spacecraft without intelligent materials

This paper investigates active vibration suppression and attitude tracking for flexible spacecraft under model uncertainty and external disturbance without flexible vibration measurement and intelligent materials. An adaptive control scheme based on a novel sliding mode surface is designed to suppress the flexible vibration introduced by flexible appendages and realize the attitude tracking. The remarkable feature of the designed algorithm is that flexible vibration is suppressed and attitude tracking is guaranteed simultaneously without intelligent materials and flexible vibration measurement. In addition, high precision attitude control can be achieved when flexible vibration is suppressed. The stability of the proposed control scheme is presented by Lyapunov techniques. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.