Abstract:

Aiming at the problem of attitude tracking and vibration suppression of a flexible spacecraft, an adaptive multilayer neural network (MNN) control method is proposed. The adaptive MNN is used to alleviate the nonlinearities and uncertainties of the system. Besides, a smoothed variable structure is applied to eliminate the approximate error and external disturbance of the MNN. The spacecraft consists typically of a rigid body and some flexible appendages, and it is assumed that the system parameters are unknown and the truncated model of the spacecraft has finite but arbitrary dimension. Only the attitude angle and its derivative are accessible for feedback control and the elastic modes are not needed. Finally, theory analysis and experimental results show that the attitude tracking and vibration suppression are accomplished effectively by the proposed method.