Novel Adaptive Saturated Attitude Tracking Control of Rigid Spacecraft with Guaranteed Transient and Steady-State Performance

In this paper, a novel adaptive model-free attitude tracking control method is investigated for rigid spacecraft with consideration of the external disturbance, unknown inertia matrix, and input saturation. First, the considered attitude tracking system with input saturation is transformed into a Lagrangian model, and a dead zone–based model is used to describe the saturation nonlinearity. Second, using the prescribed performance control theory, a static prescribed performance attitude control scheme is presented, by which the transient and steady-state performance (including the convergence rate, overshoot, and boundedness) of the attitude tracking system is proved to be guaranteed. Third, in order to improve the performance of the static prescribed performance control scheme, a novel learning-based supplementary control scheme is presented based on the approximate dynamic programming. Finally, two groups of numerical simulations are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed learning-based prescribed performance attitude control method.