Tolerance of intermittent faults in spacecraft attitude control: switched system approach

Abstract

This study models a spacecraft attitude control system (ACS) process with intermittent controller faults by a stochastic switched system, whose stability is shown to be equivalent to the fault tolerability of the ACS. A ‘global dissipativity’ concept is first introduced for the stochastic switched system to derive its stability condition, which can be checked easily via the proposed ‘gain technique’. Results shown in this study demonstrate that it may not be necessary to apply the fault-tolerant controller in spite of intermittent controller faults, and the attitude control performance can also be maintained. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed methods.