Quaternion-based adaptive terminal sliding mode control for spacecraft attitude tracking

This paper investigates the spacecraft attitude tracking control problem. A quaternion-based adaptive terminal sliding mode controller is proposed to solve this problem in the presence of model uncertainties and environmental perturbations. The proposed controller can drive the attitude motion to track a time-varying trajectory in finite time. An adaptive law is developed to estimate the generalized disturbances. Numerical simulations are finally provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.