Robust fault-tolerant saturated control for spacecraft proximity operations with actuator saturation and faults

In this paper, the motion control problem of autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and docking with a tumbling target in the presence of unknown model parameters, external disturbances, actuator saturation and faults is investigated. Firstly, a nonlinear six degree-of-freedom dynamics model is established to describe the relative motion of the chaser spacecraft with respect to the tumbling target. Subsequently, a robust fault-tolerant saturated control strategy with no precise knowledge of model parameters and external disturbances is proposed by combining the sliding mode control technique with an adaptive methodology. Then, within the Lyapunov framework, it is proved that the designed robust fault-tolerant controller can guarantee the relative position and attitude errors converge into small regions containing the origin. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control strategy.