Towards Fault-Tolerant Strategy in Satellite Attitude Control Systems: A Review

Abstract

Spacecrafts are known to be very complex engineering systems where many technological devices enter in interaction to guarantee the overall mission objectives. Regardless of those sophisticated manufacturing systems, faults/failures are inevitable during the satellite lifetime. This paper aims at discussing the state-of-the-art approaches proposed to guarantee the satellites’ attitude control system (ACS) performances when its components suffer from faults. The goal is to highlight their limits to address the specific challenges related to ACS. To localize and identify the potential faults, fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methodologies are used in an earlier stage before the adaptation of the controller. The so-called fault-tolerant control (FTC) schemes have proven their capabilities during the last decade; nevertheless, those schemes still face some challenges that reduce their optimal performance in the aerospace industry. The contribution of this paper is to highlight the motivations and challenges of FTC/FDD methodologies when used to design spacecraft attitude controllers in the case of actuators and sensors anomalous behavior and to propose hints to address them.