Structured H∞ Control for Spacecraft with Flexible Appendages

Spacecraft with large flexible appendages are characterized by multiple system modes. They suffer from inherent low-frequency disturbances in the operating environment that consequently result in considerable interference in the operational performance of the system. It is required that the control design ensures the system’s high pointing precision, and it is also necessary to suppress low-frequency resonant interference as well as take into account multiple performance criteria such as attitude stability and bandwidth constraints. Aiming at the comprehensive control problem of this kind of flexible spacecraft, we propose a control strategy using a structured H-infinity controller with low complexity that was designed to meet the multiple performance requirements, so as to reduce the project cost and implementation difficulty. According to the specific resonant mode of the system, the design strategy of adding an internal mode controller, a trap filter, and a series PID controller to the structured controller is proposed, so as to achieve the comprehensive control goals through cooperative control of multiple control modules. A spacecraft with flexible appendages (solar array) is presented as an illustrative example in which a weighted function was designed for each performance requirement of the system (namely robustness, stability, bandwidth limit, etc.), and a structured comprehensive performance matrix with multiple performance weights and decoupled outputs was constructed. A structured H-infinity controller meeting the comprehensive performance requirements is given, which provides a structured integrated control method with low complexity for large flexible systems that is convenient for engineering practice, and provides a theoretical basis and reference examples for structured H-infinity control. The simulation results show that the proposed controller gives better control performance compared with the traditional H-infinity one, and can successfully suppress the vibration of large flexible appendages at 0.12 Hz and 0.66 Hz.