Stabilization of flexible spacecraft based on non-smooth control technique

Flexible spacecraft is a kind of complex systems consisting of rigid bodies and flexible appendages. The attitude maneuvering or external disturbances will unavoidably lead to a continuous vibration of flexible appendages. It is known that non-smooth control systems have rapid convergence performance and better disturbance rejection property. To this end, by utilizing non-smooth control technique, a backstepping control scheme with flexible modal observer is deduced for stabilizing a class of flexible spacecraft. Based on stability theory of cascaded system, the corresponding closed loop systems have been rigorously proved to be asymptotically stable. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.