Robust backstepping attitude tracking control of an underactuated spacecraft with saturation and time-variant perturbations

This study investigated associations of attitude tracking control of an underactuated spacecraft with consideration of saturation and perturbations. A nonsingular attitude tracking control was proposed which did not need limiting initial conditions of the quaternions. The controller was analyzed based on Lyapunov criteria and LaSalle’s invariance theorem in the large-angle maneuver. In order to control, the complete kinematic and dynamic model of the underactuated spacecraft was reconstructed. According to simulation results, our controller has excellent robustness against the hard saturation, external disturbances, time-varying inertia uncertainties, and internal disturbances of actuators. As result, we found that the attitude controller was asymptotically stable under the soft saturation and the perturbations so that quaternions and angular velocity converged to the desired path within the 80 s. Also, it was still asymptotic stable under the hard saturation whose level is equal to 0.035 Nm, 3.5% of the soft saturation level. In this case, errors of quaternions and angular velocity were converged to the origin within the 150 s. Finally, the closed-loop system was verified by Adams-MATLAB co-simulation. The maximum verification errors for quaternions were less than 19%, while the maximum verification errors for angular velocity were less than 13.5%.