Robust Control of Flexible Spacecraft

A well-designed feedback control system exhibits the properties of external disturbance attenuation and performance robustness with respect to plant uncertainty. The plant uncertainties of flexible spacecraft include unmodeled dynamics and parameter uncertainties. Singular value robustness measures are used to compare performance and stability robustness properties of different control design techniques in the presence of residual modal interaction (control and observation spillover) for a design example which is representative of a practical flexible spacecraft system. The control designs evaluated include linear quadratic geometry (LQG) control, integral feedback, bias removal control, innovations feedthrough, and frequency-shaped LQG.