A refined anti‐disturbance control method for gimbal servo systems subject to multiple disturbances under constraints

Abstract The performance of the gimbal servo system in control moment gyro (CMG), which includes precision, lifespan etc., is one of the crucial factors of spacecraft attitude control. The various practical disturbances, however, will not only deteriorate the velocity‐tracking accuracy but will also cause the abnormal gimbal velocity problem (especially peak phenomenon). To this end, this paper proposes a refined anti‐disturbance control method to deal with velocity output constraints and multiple disturbances. Starting with fully understanding the prior information of multiple disturbances, a refined disturbance observer with a low conservativeness is designed to accurately estimate disturbances. The disturbance‐estimation error is analyzed in detail to ensure convergence to a bounded region. Subsequently, a novel barrier Lyapunov function‐based backstepping controller is proposed that considers the residuals of disturbance estimation to simultaneously achieve multiple disturbances attenuation and compensation, and handle velocity output constraints. Notably, the gimbal's maximum velocity is precisely limited to a pre‐specified low range, which benefits the CMG's lifespan and performance. Finally, both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method performs better in disturbance estimation, velocity tracking, and robustness.