An Adaptive Disturbance Rejection Approach for Enabling Pointing and Shape Control of Highly Flexible Antenna Structures

This effort investigates an adaptive disturbance rejection approach for improving attitude control performance of spacecraft with large flexible structures. The technique blends adaptive sensor fusion with closed loop adaptive filtering to improve baseline attitude controller performance. The effort focuses on application to systems with large radar structures, to enable lighter more flexible structures to be utilized in future systems. A key contribution in Phase I is a proof-of-concept demonstration of the adaptive disturbance rejection approach and development of a flight experiment concept for the Deployable Structures Experiment (DSX).