PSO-based state feedback control of flexible spacecraft for attitude tracking and vibration suppression

PD state-feedback controller has been adopted in many spacecraft for attitude tracking and presents good performance. For flexible spacecraft, the controller can be designed with a term which takes into account the flexible dynamics. However, duo to nonlinearity and coupling, how to determine state-feedback control parameters which ensure fast attitude tracking and significant vibration suppression must be considered. In this paper, the dynamics model of spacecraft with flexible appendages is derived with the hybrid coordinate method and the full state feedback controller originated from the PD control algorithm is designed. A method of estimating the flexible spacecraft's controller parameters based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is presented. Taking the PD controller parameters as optimized variables, optimal control state is defined as the linear weighted sum of response error of all state variables is smallest with the limited actuator output moment. Simulation results show that the optimized controller obtained by PSO algorithm makes attitude of spacecraft converge quickly and elastic vibration suppressed effectively.