Distributed adaptive fault-tolerant control for spacecraft formation with communication delays

This paper investigates distributed adaptive fault-tolerant control schemes for spacecraft formation subject to external disturbances, model uncertainties and communication delays. Two novel adaptive fault-tolerant control approaches are presented based on directed communication interaction. The developed adaptive laws are used to estimate the actuator effectiveness, the spacecraft masses and the upper bound on external disturbances. Then, an adaptive fault-tolerant control algorithm with time-varying communication delays is proposed. In particular, the conditions on the controller parameters and the communication delays necessary to assure the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system are given. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to validate the effectiveness of the two proposed fault-tolerant control schemes for the spacecraft formation system.