PLANAR MANEUVERING OF A SPACECRAFT WITH PROPELLANT SLOSHING USING SWITCHED FEEDBACK

This paper studies the maneuvering control problem for a spacecraft with fuel slosh in a zero gravity environment. The propellant is modeled as a pendulum mass anchored at the center of a spherical tank. After obtaining the coupled equations of motion, linear and switched nonlinear feedback controllers are developed to achieve planar spacecraft pitch maneuvers while suppressing the slosh mode. It is shown that the linear controllers are ill-equipped to achieve the desired spacecraft attitude and transverse velocity simultaneously, especially during aggressive pitch maneuvers; while the switched nonlinear feedback controllers are superior in this regard.