Attitude stabilization of rigid spacecraft with finite‐time convergence

Abstract The problem of attitude control for a spacecraft model which is nonlinear in dynamics with inertia uncertainty and external disturbance is investigated in this paper. Two sliding mode controllers are proposed to force the state variables of the closed‐loop system to converge to the origin in finite time. Specially, the second control design consists of the estimation of the uncertainty and disturbance by adaptive method and thus it achieves the decrease of undesired chattering effectively. Also, simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the control strategies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.