Prescribed Performance Based Finite-Time Attitude Tracking Control for Rigid Spacecraft

This paper investigates the attitude tracking control problem for rigid spacecraft with bounded external disturbance. By combing the terminal sliding-mode technique and the prescribed performance concept, a finite-time control scheme with sliding-mode surface constraint is proposed, whose structure is simpler than the conventional transformed error constraint methods. Then, a saturation function is introduced to the control scheme to eliminate singularity, and the system performance in both the reaching phase and the ideal sliding-mode are studied. Stability analysis shows that the proposed control scheme can make the spacecraft tracking a time-varying desired signal with a finite-time convergence. The effectiveness of the attitude tracking control scheme is evaluated by numerical simulations.