Fuzzy Control of Flexible Multibody Spacecraft: A Linear Matrix Inequality Approach

To reduce the cost of lifting to orbit, modern spacecraft and structures used in space applications are designed from light material as flexible multibody system. Moreover The unprecedented requirements for rapid retargeting, precision pointing and tracking capability have made these multibody highly flexible spacecraft vulnerable to dynamic excitation caused by the slewing/pointing maneuver, vibration and external disturbances. As a result, this will degrade the performance of the spacecraft including the pointing accuracy. Thus the aspect of modeling and control become extremely important for the safe and effective operation. Despite the numerous research, the development of high performance, nonlinear control laws for attitude stability, rapid slewing and precision pointing remain the primary objective of scientists and engineers. The aim of the work presented in this thesis is to investigate the stability, performance, and robustness of a class of fuzzy control system called Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) applied to a flexible multi-body spacecraft, and to show the advantage and the simplicity in implementing the T-S fuzzy controller over other baseline nonlinear controllers

Attitude Control of a Flexible Spacecraft via Fuzzy Optimal Variance Technique

This paper investigates the performance of a fuzzy optimal variance control technique for attitude stability and vibration attenuation with regard to a spacecraft made of a rigid platform and multiple flexible appendages that can be retargeted to the line of sight. The proposed technique addresses the problem of actuators’ amplitude and rate constraints. The fuzzy model of the spacecraft is developed based on the Takagi-Sugeno(T-S) fuzzy model with disturbances, and the control input is designed using the Parallel Distributed Compensation technique (PDC). The problem is presented as an optimization problem in the form of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). The performance and the stability of the proposed controller are investigated through numerical simulation