Abstract: | The paper presents a quaternion feedback attitude control law for spacecraft attitude maneuver. A nonlinear feedback controller is designed to achieve L2 gain performance, i.e., the resulting closed‐loop system is designed such that the L2 gain from the exogenous disturbance to the performance measure is less than a scalar. The solution of the nonlinear H∞ control problem is known to be related to the existence of a solution to the Hamilton‐Jacobi inequality. In the paper, a solution for spacecraft attitude control is conjectured and shown to satisfy the H∞ criterion. The result generalizes existing methods in two regards: the proposed Hamilton‐Jacobi function is more general than existing ones and the resulting controller contains a nonlinear term that can be used to address the nonlinear couplings between quaternion terms. The method is applied to the ROCSAT‐3 orbit raising control problem to verify its effectiveness. |