Inverse optimal adaptive control for attitude tracking of spacecraft

TLDR

The paper addresses attitude tracking of a rigid spacecraft with external disturbances and uncertain inertia using an adaptive control approach. The authors employ an inverse‑optimal adaptive control scheme that uses integrator backstepping and a control‑Lyapunov argument to achieve disturbance attenuation and global asymptotic tracking, while analyzing parameter convergence through invariant‑manifold theory. The resulting adaptive controllers are shown to be optimal for a family of cost functionals and demonstrate effective performance in numerical simulations.

Abstract

The attitude tracking control problem of a rigid spacecraft with external disturbances and an uncertain inertia matrix is addressed using the adaptive control method. The adaptive control laws proposed in this paper are optimal with respect to a family of cost functionals. This is achieved by the inverse optimality approach, without solving the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs partial differential (HJIPD) equation directly. The design of the optimal adaptive controllers is separated into two stages by means of integrator backstepping, and a control Lyapunov argument is constructed to show that the inverse optimal adaptive controllers achieve H/sub /spl infin// disturbance attenuation with respect to external disturbances and global asymptotic convergence of tracking errors to zero for disturbances with bounded energy. The convergence of adaptive parameters is also analyzed in terms of invariant manifold. Numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed control algorithms.