Abstract: “This paper is concerned with designing a control law for vibration suppression of a flexible spacecraft in the presence of external disturbances using distributed piezoelectric sensors and actuators. To satisfy pointing requirements and simultaneously suppress vibrations, two separate control actions are applied. The first action uses piezoceramics as sensors and actuators to actively suppress certain flexible modes through feedback control. The second control action uses open loop controller designed based on time optimal control theory to achieve fast maneuver. The two controllers has the ability to perform, simultaneously, minimum time maneuver and suppress the vibrations resulting from the bang-bang control spillover to the flexible modes. Modeling and simulation studies for the proposed control strategy on a flexible spacecraft have been carried out which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.”

Keywords: Flexible spacecraft; vibrations; controls; piezoelectric materials; sensors and actuators.