Robust stabilization of the attitude of rigid spacecraft with bounded external disturbances using sliding mode control technique

This paper describes the attitude stabilization problem of a rigid spacecraft. We consider the stabilization problem both in absence and presence of disturbances. To obtain a better disturbance rejection property we use sliding mode controller design technique. Stabilization of rigid spacecraft is a particular type of problem that can be solved with sliding mode control. A discontinuous finite time control law is proposed in presence of disturbances by applying sliding mode method such that the states eventually converge to a small region of origin. After that the results are shown for stabilization for a particular example with specific values of parameters. Numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the method.