Extended harmonic disturbance observer-based attitude control for flexible spacecraft with control moment gyroscopes

In the flexible spacecraft with control moment gyroscopes, there are multiple disturbances including not only internal disturbances from actuators and flexible appendages, but also external disturbances from space environment. These disturbances are characterized by a wide frequency range and may degrade attitude control performance to a great extent. In this paper, the lumped disturbance is modeled as a harmonic plus a polynomial model, and an extended harmonic disturbance observer (EHDO) is proposed to estimate the total disturbance. Since the rotor dynamic imbalance disturbance from control moment gyroscopes is described by an internal harmonic model, the lumped disturbance can be estimated precisely via EHDO even with a lower bandwidth. Afterwards, a backstepping-based composite controller is designed to compensate the disturbances by combining the output of EHDO and realize high-precision attitude control for flexible spacecraft with control moment gyroscopes. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.