Antidisturbance Controllability Analysis and Enhanced Antidisturbance Controller Design With Application to Flexible Spacecraft

For a practical engineering system, disturbances usually have a negative impact on system performance. Especially, when the system physical constraints (e.g., actuator amplitude saturation and input channel constraint) are present, the study for antidisturbance controllability (ADC) is of paramount importance. This article presents the concepts of disturbance estimability, disturbance compensability, and an enhanced antidisturbance control (EADC). From the viewpoint of control system design, an example of spacecraft attitude control is given. The control constraints and multiple disturbances are explicitly analyzed for the sake of attitude control system design of flexible spacecraft. Subsequently, an EADC approach with integration of the disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) and active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed, based on the characteristics of disturbances exposed. Moreover, prescribed performance approach is incorporated into the spacecraft attitude tracking control. In consequence, the presented control can not only achieve superior antidisturbance capability than DOBC or ADRC, but also quantify the control performances. Numerical simulations and hardware-in-the-loop tests exemplify the applicability of the proposed scheme.