Active fault‐tolerant attitude control for flexible spacecraft with loss of actuator effectiveness

A theoretical framework for active fault‐tolerant attitude stabilization control is developed and applied to flexible spacecraft. The proposed scheme solves a difficult problem of fault‐tolerant controller design in the presence of severe partial loss of actuator effectiveness faults and external disturbances. This is accomplished by developing an observer‐based fault detection and diagnosis mechanism to reconstruct the actuator faults. Accordingly, a backstepping‐based fault‐tolerant control law is reconfigured using the reconstructed fault information. It is shown that the proposed design approach guarantees that all of the signals of the closed‐loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded. The closed‐loop performance of the proposed control strategy is evaluated extensively through numerical simulations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.