Decentralized Fault-Tolerant Control for Satellite Attitude Synchronization

This paper presents a decentralized adaptive fuzzy approximation design to achieve attitude tracking control for formation flying in the presence of external disturbances and actuator faults. A nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode controller that is based on consensus theory is designed for distributed cooperative attitude synchronization. It solves synchronization issues between multiple satellites by information topology. In the proposed control scheme, a fuzzy logic system (FLS) is introduced to approximate unknown individual satellite attitude dynamics due to actuator faults. In order to achieve fault management without the involvement of ground-station operators, the proposed control laws do not require an explicit fault detection and isolation mechanism. Numerical simulation results including actuator dynamics and initial condition uncertainties show that the proposed strategy with FLS can compensate for a fault. The system continues to operate after wheel faults, and the closed-loop distributed tracking control system is stochastically stable.