Output-feedback super-twisting control for line-of-sight angles tracking of non-cooperative target spacecraft

Without the line-of-sight (LOS) angles rate information, this paper investigates the LOS angles tracking problem of non-cooperative target in chaser's body frame with the external disturbance force and torque via chaser's control torque. By integrating with the attitude dynamics of the chaser, a novel coupled LOS-based relative motion model is firstly established, which reveals the redundancy relationship between the LOS angles motion with two Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) and three dimensional control torque. More specially, the LOS angles tracking control problem is formulated as an output-feedback control problem of an uncertain nonlinear system with the actuator redundancy. As a stepping-stone, a fourth order high order sliding mode observer (HOSMO) is proposed to estimate the system state and uncertain terms. A combination of modified super twisting algorithm (STA) with nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode (NFTSM) and control allocation is proposed, the main novelty of modified STA is that the NFTSM is introduced to replace the linear sliding mode (LSM), and the original STA cannot be applied directly, a modified STA is proposed, which can guarantee the fast finite-time convergence. Finally, simulations are conducted to show fine performance of the proposed control scheme. (C) 2019 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.