Tolerance of intermittent faults in spacecraft attitude control: switched system approach

This study models a spacecraft attitude control system (ACS) process with intermittent controller faults by a stochastic switched system, whose stability is shown to be equivalent to the fault tolerability of the ACS. A `global dissipativity` concept is first introduced for the stochastic switched system to derive its stability condition, which can be checked easily via the proposed `gain technique`. Results shown in this study demonstrate that it may not be necessary to apply the fault-tolerant controller in spite of intermittent controller faults, and the attitude control performance can also be maintained. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed methods.