Robust adaptive control of spacecraft attitude systems with unknown dead zones of unknown bounds

This paper addresses the problem of attitude control of a spacecraft when unknown dead zones of unknown bounds exist at the actuators. A robust adaptive controller with parameter update laws are designed for the spacecraft’s attitude and an asymptotically stable tracking performance is mathematically proven based on the proposed design. Numerical simulation results along with the theoretical proof show that the proposed control scheme can successfully stabilize the attitude of the spacecraft with the unknown actuator dead zones.