Adaptive Tracking of Large-Angle Maneuvers for Spacecraft Equipped with an Active Pointing Ultraquiet Platform

An adaptive controller for the tracking of large-angle maneuvers is proposed for spacecraft equipped with an active pointing ultraquiet platform (AQP). The inertial parameters of the spacecraft and the payload (supported by the AQP) are estimated online, whereas the parameters of the AQP are assumed to be precisely known. To enable the derivation of the proposed controller, a novel dynamic model of AQP spacecraft was derived, which employs relative motion variables for the payload and is linear in the unknown inertial parameters. A Lyapunov-like argument was used to prove the local asymptotical stability of the closed-loop system, and the original controller was simplified further to a physically more intuitive proportional-differential (PD) plus adaptive feed-forward controller. The superior tracking performance of the proposed controller compared with that of a standard PD plus nonadaptive feed-forward controller was shown via numerical simulation. It also was shown that the estimates of a selected set of unknown inertial parameters will converge to their true values if a certain kind of maneuver trajectory is tracked.