Tan-Type BLF-Based Attitude Tracking Control Design for Rigid Spacecraft with Arbitrary Disturbances

This study deals with the problem of disturbances in observer-based attitude tracking control for spacecraft in the presence of inertia-matrix uncertainty and arbitrary disturbance. Following the backstepping control, a tan-type barrier Lyapunov function (BLF)-based attitude tracking control method with prescribed settling time and performance is systematically developed. The proposed control framework possesses three advantages over the existing attitude controllers. Firstly, the singularity problem associated with the use of fractional power in fixed-time control is effectively resolved without employing any command filter or piece-wise continuous function. Secondly, inspired by the concept of the tan-type BLF approach, any desired performance for the attitude tracking error is satisfied. Lastly, the total disturbance, including the system’s uncertainty, external disturbances, and time-derivative of the virtual control, is precisely reconstructed during a predefined time, even if the initial estimation error tends to infinity. Moreover, this time is determined as a tunable gain in the observer. The numerical simulations confirm the superior performance of the proposed control strategy in comparison with the existing pertinent works.