Purpose
This paper aims to study the attitude control problem with mutating orbital rate and actuator fading.
Design/methodology/approach
To avoid malicious physical attacks and hide itself, the spacecraft may irregularly switch its orbit altitude within a specific range, which will bring about variations in orbital rate, thereby causing mutations in the attitude dynamics model. The actuator faults will also cause changes in system dynamics. Both factors affect the control performance. First, this paper determines the potential switching orbits. Then under different conditions, design controllers that can accommodate actuator faults according to the statistical law of actuator fading.
Findings
This paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, for the first time, introduces the Markovian jump framework to model the possible unexpected mutating of orbital rate and actuator fading of spacecraft and then designs a novel control policy to solve the attitude control problem.
Practical implications
This paper also provides the algorithm design processes in detail. A comparative numerical simulation is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Originality/value
This is an early solution for spacecraft attitude control with dynamics model mutations.
Nonlinear disturbance observer based spacecraft attitude control subject to disturbances and actuator faults
