Unwinding-free property of the dual-quaternion-based pose tracking controllers designed by fully actuated system approaches

Abstract

An adverse issue known as the unwinding phenomenon often arises in the pose (attitude and position) control of spacecraft, increasing the spacecraft energy consumption and degrading the spacecraft control performance. Various methods have been proposed to prevent the occurrence of this issue, such as introducing logic variables with hysteresis, using switching functions, and designing anti-unwinding functions. In contrast to these works, this investigation provides a way different from the existing works to achieve unwinding-free pose control. Due to the special structure of the dual-quaternion-based pose controllers designed by the fully actuated system methodology, they are free from the unwinding phenomenon. This leads to that the present work does not require any additional operations to prevent the occurrence of the unwinding phenomenon. The stability of the controlled system and the unwinding-free property of the proposed controllers are demonstrated through both theoretical analyses and numerical simulations.