Robust adaptive vibration control of an underactuated flexible spacecraft

Designing a controller for multi-body systems including flexible and rigid bodies has always been one of the major engineering challenges. Equations of motion of these systems comprise extremely nonlinear and coupled terms. Vibrations of flexible bodies affect sensors of rigid bodies and might make the system unstable. Introducing a new control strategy for designing control systems which do not require the rigid-flexible coupling model and can dwindle vibrations without sensors or actuators on flexible bodies is the purpose of this paper. In this study, a spacecraft comprising a rigid body and a flexible panel is used as the case study, and its equations of motion are extracted using Lagrange equations in terms of quasi-coordinates. For oscillations on a rigid body to be eliminated, a frequency estimation algorithm and an adaptive filtering are used. A controller is designed based on the rigid model of the system, and then robust stability conditions for the rigid-flexible system are obtained. The conditions are also developed for the spacecraft with more than one active frequency. Finally, the robust adaptive vibration control system is simulated in the presence of resonance. Simulations' results indicate the advantage of the control method even when several active frequencies simultaneously resonate the dynamics system.