Intelligent control of spacecraft in the presence of actuator failures

We prove the stability of a recently proposed scheme for failure detection and identification (FDI) and adaptive reconfigurable control for spacecraft. It is shown that the scheme guarantees fast and accurate detection and identification of actuator failures, and convergence of the tracking errors to zero despite the presence of control input saturation. The scheme is based on the recently developed FDI technique employing adaptive interacting multiple observers and its extension to the case of nonlinear spacecraft dynamics. Robustness of the overall scheme and excellent performance that was obtained despite the simultaneous presence of actuator failure, control input saturation, bounded external disturbances, parametric uncertainty, and measurement noise are illustrated through numerical simulations.