Practical fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode control of spacecraft

In this study, a new adaptive fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode (AFONTSM) controller is presented. A novel multi-purpose sliding surface is constructed, with the aim of bringing the reaction wheels in to rest after every attitude stabilization maneuver, utilizing the fractional-order difference of the quaternion error and the reaction wheels angular momentum error. The closed-loop system’s practical fixed-time stability is investigated using the Lyapunov theorem under uncertainty and external disturbance. The AFONTSM controller’s performance is compared with the existing nonsingular terminal sliding mode (NTSM), full-order NTSM, and fractional-order sliding mode controllers. Finally, the proposed AFONTSM controller’s effectiveness is studied in close-to-reality situations through practical experiments on the spacecraft attitude control subsystem simulator under internal/external disturbance and uncertainty; then, the results are compared with previous studies. •Fractional calculus grants more degrees of freedom to integer-order controllers.•Reaction wheels have restrictions on their torque and angular momentum.•Attitude stabilization and momentum management are important problems.•In fixed-time stability, the settling time function is upper bounded.