In order to reduce launch costs, flexible composite materials are extensively used in the wing and brace structures of spacecraft. Thus, under launch weight limits, more payloads can be accommodated on the spacecraft with these lightweight structures which is also named as a flexible-rigid coupled spacecraft. It is well known that attitude control of spacecraft plays a fundamental role in accomplishing various space missions. Nevertheless, for flexible-rigid coupled spacecraft, attitude maneuver will induce the elastic vibration of these flexible structures and, on the other side, this elastic vibration will in turn degrade the attitude control performance of spacecraft and even destroy the stability of closed-loop system in some worse scenarios. Moreover, the external disturbances persistently acting on the on-orbit spacecraft, such as gravity-gradient torque, magnetic torque, aerodynamic torque, etc., will further excite elastic vibration and deteriorate control precision, which poses more difficulties for attitude control of spacecraft. Clearly, attenuating the vibration of flexible-rigid coupled spacecraft during attitude maneuver is a challenging problem to be resolved. In order to address the problem, this paper newly proposes a finite frequency robust H_infty control strategy for vibration attenuation of the considered spacecraft. By virtue of Lagrangian approach and modal analysis technique, the dynamics of the considered spacecraft are derived as a system with given vibration modes. Besides, it is noted that the low-order vibration modes gathering in a specific frequency range always play the crucial role in the elastic vibration of flexible structures. Different from the conventional robust vibration control methods which neglect this fact and establish the H_infty performance index over the entire frequency range, the developed control scheme focuses on attenuating the effects of the vibration modes in given frequency region and guaranteeing the asymptotic stability of closed-loop system for all frequency range. Since the control energy is applied to the specific frequency band corresponding to the low-order vibration modes, the better vibration control performance can be achieved when compared with traditional robust vibration control methods. On the other hand, output feedback scheme is employed for controller design. Based on Lyapunov functional, the stability of the closed-loop system is strictly proved. Furthermore, with the aid of convex optimization technique, the main results of this paper are formulated in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) which can be easily resolved by standard software. Finally, an illustrative design example together with simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed vibration control strategy.


Finite Frequency Robust Vibration Control of Flexible-Rigid Coupled Spacecraft

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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