Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
Two philosophies for the attitude control of space vehicles with flexible appendages have appeared in the literature, these are:
(i) control of the rigid centre body to lie within some bounded region while the flexural vibrations are allowed to behave in an uncontrolled manner;
(ii) control of all plant states to some finite value as time tends to infinity.
The former method does not require flexural information and therefore avoids the on-board computational burden associated with state estimation, or the cost of additional instrumentation. However, attitude degradation has been observed and reported indicating a clear need to compensate for structural vibrations.