Deep space exploration has moved up the agenda over the last twenty years. Consequently, developments in the guidance, navigation, and control of spacecraft have accelerated. Attitude control, a spacecraft subsystem, plays a key role in spacecraft design. In turn, the operating conditions in space mean that sensors, actuators, and controllers are both likely to go wrong, and also very unlikely to be physically accessible for maintenance. Attitude control systems must therefore ensure stability, reliability, and meet required performance thresholds, even when components fail. Fault tolerant control is a widely-used technique used to meet this goal.

Fault Tolerant Attitude Control of Spacecraft presents the fundamentals of spacecraft fault tolerant attitude control systems, and presents the most recent research through advanced, nonlinear control techniques. This title gives researchers a self-contained guide to the complex tasks of envisaging, designing, implementing, and experimenting with fault tolerant attitude control. It presents designs for integrated modelling, dynamics, fault tolerant attitude control, and fault reconstruction for spacecraft. Specifically, this book introduces the topic and gives a full literature review, and presents in turn: preliminaries and mathematical models; robust fault tolerant attitude control; fault tolerant attitude control with actuator saturation; velocity-free fault tolerant attitude control; finite-time fault tolerant attitude tracking control; and active fault tolerant attitude contour. It then offers a conclusion, and looks to the future. This book offers a one-stop solution for researchers and engineers working on fault tolerant attitude control for spacecraft.