Spacecraft attitude control using approximate receding-horizon model-error control synthesis

Model-error control synthesis is a nonlinear robust control approach that mitigates the effects of modeling errors and disturbances on a system by providing corrections to the nominal control input directly. In this paper, model-error control synthesis is applied to the spacecraft attitude control problem, in which the model-error vector is computed using a receding-horizon approximation. The main advantage of this approach over other adaptive approaches for spacecraft attitude control is that it can simultaneously handle both inertia modeling errors and time-varying disturbances. A design scheme is presented to determine the weighting factor and the length of the associated receding-horizon interval of the model-error solution by minimizing the closed-loop sensitivity norm. Simulation results are provided to show the performance of the new control approach.