Low-complexity prescribed performance control for spacecraft attitude stabilization and tracking

In this paper, the attitude stabilization and tracking control problem is investigated for spacecraft with consideration of unknown dynamics and external disturbance. A low-complexity prescribed performance attitude control scheme is presented to solve this problem. Different from the existing works, there are threefold prominent advantages. The first one is the transient performance and the steady performance of the system is guaranteed by a user-defined function rather than depending on repeated adjustment of controller parameters. The second is that no information of the system and external disturbance is necessary in the developed control scheme, which means the method is model-free. Moreover, the developed low-complexity controller is calculated without any time-consuming iterative operations; thus it's significantly advantageous in engineering applications. It is proved that the state variables converge to the prescribed region at a prescribed exponential rate under the proposed control scheme. Four groups of numerical simulations are organized to validate the effectiveness of the method. (C) 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.