Thruster-Based Attitude and Translation Control with Minimum Pulse-Count Disturbance Rejection

Thruster-based control typically requires a substantial engineering effort in order to mitigate an important issue: the control system tends to use many thruster pulses to accomplish what a single thruster pulse could do instead. This fundamental problem arises because the standard controller’s feedback response is (by definition) proportional to the spacecraft’s current tracking error state alone, without regard for the time-integrated tracking error. By ignoring this particular signal, it becomes especially difficult to build a control system that realizes the following performance capabilities (PCs):