Disturbance observer based finite-time attitude control for rigid spacecraft under input saturation

A novel finite-time controller integrated with disturbance observer is investigated for a rigid spacecraft in the presence of disturbance, actuator saturation and misalignment. As a stepping-stone, a second-order disturbance observer is designed firstly such that the reconstruction of lumped disturbances is accomplished in finite time with zero error. Then, with the reconstructed information, a finite-time controller is synthesized even under actuator input saturation and misalignment, and the closed-loop system/state is proved to be finite-time stable and converges to the specified time-varying sliding mode surface. Moreover, the input saturation constraint is overcome via introducing an auxiliary variable to compensate for the overshooting. Numerical simulation results for the in-orbit rigid spacecraft show good performances, which validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed schemes. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.