Quaternion based sliding mode attitude control design for spacecraft

In this paper, the attitude tracking control problem is investigated for a rigid spacecraft. Robust controllers based on the quaternion model are proposed to solve this problem with external perturbations. An exponential reaching law-based sliding mode control approach is proposed for the problem. The controller guarantees the convergence of attitude tracking errors in finite time, where the settling time can be set in advance, for spacecraft attitude tracking problem. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.