active suspension

adaptive control

fault tolerant

attitude control

variable structure

attitude tracking

formation flying

external disturbances

optimal control

disturbance rejection

International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control

Summary In this paper, an adaptive fixed‐time fault‐tolerant control scheme is presented for rigid spacecraft with inertia uncertainties and external disturbances. By using an inverse trigonometric function, a novel double power reaching law is constructed to speed up the state stabilization and reduce the chattering phenomenon simultaneously. Then, an adaptive fixed‐time fault‐tolerant controller is developed for the spacecraft with the actuator faults, such that the fixed‐time convergence of the attitude and angular velocity could be guaranteed, and no prior knowledge on the upper bound of the lumped uncertainties is required anymore in the controller design. Comparative simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed scheme.

Adaptive fixed‐time fault‐tolerant control for rigid spacecraft using a double power reaching law