Hybrid control for rapid spacecraft attitude maneuvers

A strong robust hybrid controller consisting of cascade-saturation controller and variable-structure controller is developed to rapidly maneuver the spacecraft attitude under various physical constraints. The cascade-saturation surface, which is a type of sliding mode surface, is firstly developed to guarantee the trajectory consistency between sliding mode surface and cascade-saturation controller. An on-off type of input is then designed to hold the system states near the sliding mode surface under the constraint of actuator saturation (torque and slew rate). The stability and rapidity of the proposed controller is proofed. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to verify the feasibility of the proposed controller.