Observer-based fault-tolerant fixed-time attitude tracking control for rigid spacecraft without angular velocity measurement

This paper investigates the problem of adaptive nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode fixed-time tracking control method for rigid spacecraft without angular velocity measurement. First, a novel fixed-time extended state observer is proposed to obtain accurate estimates of both unmeasurable angular velocities and integrated disturbance. Then, based on this sufficient qualification, an adaptive fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller is designed to make the state of the following spacecraft track a target spacecraft even when the tracking system has an actuator fault. Adaptive technology is introduced to compensate for the effect of observation error on the controller. Using the Lyapunov function and fixed-time property, it is proved that the control scheme can ensure that the attitude tracking error converges to the neighborhood of the origin in a fixed time and is independent of the initial conditions. Finally, numerical simulation examples are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed fixed-time method.