Twistor-based synchronous sliding mode control of spacecraft attitude and position

A synchronous control of relative attitude and position is required in separated ultra-quiet spacecraft, such as drag-free, disturbance-free, and distributed spacecraft. Thus, a twistor-based synchronous sliding mode control is investigated in this paper to solve the control problem of relative attitude and position among separated spacecraft modules. The twistor-based control design and the stability proof are implemented using the Modified Rodrigues Parameter (MRP). To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control method, this paper presents a case study of separated spacecraft flying control considering the mass uncertainty and external disturbances. In addition, a simulation study of the Proportional-Derivative (PD) control is also presented for comparison. The results indicate that the twistor-based sliding mode controller can ensure global asymptotic stability. The states converge fast with ultra-precision and ultra-stability in both the attitude and position. Moreover, the proposed twistor-based sliding mode control system is robust to the mass uncertainty and external disturbances.