Comparing the Performance of Reference Trajectory Management and Controller Reconfiguration in Attitude Fault Tolerant Control

Reference trajectory management is a method to modify reference trajectories for the faulty system. The modified reference trajectories define new maneuvers for the system to retain its pre-fault dynamic performance. Controller reconfiguration is another method to handle faults in the system, for instance by adjusting the controller parameters (coefficients). Both of these two methods have been considered in the literature and are proven to be capable of handling various faults. However, the comparison of these two methods has not been considered sufficiently. In this paper, a controller reconfiguration mechanism and a reference trajectory management are proposed for the spacecraft attitude fault tolerant control problem. Then, these two methods are compared under the same conditions, and it is shown that the proposed controller reconfiguration has better performance than the proposed reference trajectory management. The reason is that the controller reconfiguration has more variables to modify the closed-loop system behavior.