Robust actuator fault diagnosis and tolerant control for satellite attitude control systems

This paper is concerned with the design of a robust actuator fault diagnosis and tolerant control scheme for satellite attitude control systems. A bank of sliding mode observers (SMOs) are firstly investigated to detect and isolate single actuator fault for satellite attitude control systems with input disturbance. When an actuator undergoes unknown fault, it is disabled. Under such condition, a novel fault tolerant controller based on sliding mode control method is proposed to keep system safe using the remaining actuators. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for satellite attitude control systems. © 2011 ISSN 1881-803X.