Robust and fault-tolerant spacecraft attitude control based on an extended-observer design

The aim of this work is to develop a robust control strategy able to drive the attitude of a spacecraft to a reference value, despite the presence of unknown but bounded uncertainties in the system parameters and external disturbances. Thanks to the use of an extended observer design, the proposed control law is robust against all the uncertainties that affect the high-frequency gain matrix, which is shown to capture a broad spectrum of modelling issues, some of which are often neglected by traditional approaches. The proposed controller then provides robustness against parametric uncertainties, as moment of inertia estimation, payload deformations, actuator faults and external disturbances, while maintaining its asymptotic properties.