With the development of space laser communication and the planned deployment of satellite Internet constellations, there is a growing demand for microminiature laser communication terminals. To meet the requirements of size, weight and power (SWaP), miniaturized terminals require smaller drive components to complete on-orbit scanning and capture, which must be fast and efficient to enable satellite laser communication networks. These miniaturized laser communication terminals are highly susceptible to the impact of the initial pointing accuracy of the laser beam and microvibrations of the satellite platform. Therefore, this paper proposes a laser scanning-capture model based on a Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS) micromirror that can provide a fast, large-scale scanning analysis. A scanning overlap factor is introduced to improve the capture probability under the influence of microvibrations. Finally, experimental analysis was carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, which can establish a theoretical basis for future ultra-long-distance microspace laser communication.

This paper proposes a novel robust control scheme for tip trajectory tracking of a lightweight flexible single-link arm. The developed control scheme deals with the influence of tip payload changes and disturbances during the working process of the flexible arm, thus realizing the accurate tracking for the tip reference trajectory. The robust control scheme is composed of an inner loop and an outer loop. The inner loop adopts the traditional PD control, and an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) with a sliding mode (SM) compensation is designed in the outer loop. Moreover, the sliding mode compensation is mainly used to cope with the disturbance estimation error from the extended state observer (ESO), by which the insensitivity to tip payload variations and strong disturbance resistance is achieved. Finally, some numerical simulations are performed to support the theoretical analysis. The results show that the system is more robust to the tip mass variations of the arm and more resistant to the external torque after adding the sliding mode robustness term to the ADRC.

In this paper, the finite-time trajectory tracking control problem of a flexible link manipulator (FLM) system with unknown parameters is investigated in joint space. An adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode (ANTSM) controller based on an extended state observer (ESO) is proposed to ensure that the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of zero. Firstly, an adaptive ESO is introduced, which is used to estimate unknown system parameters, including the unknown rigid-flexible coupling coefficient and the unknown control gain. Then, an ESO based on the parameters estimated above is proposed to estimate the unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances of the system in real-time. Finally, an ANTSM controller based on ESO is studied to achieve finite-time trajectory tracking control and vibration suppression without any prior knowledge of system uncertainties and external disturbances. The finite-time convergence ability of the closed-loop system is proved by Lyapunov theory. Experimental results on the Quanser Flexible Link System verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

Usually, the order of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is equal to the relative order of the plant. To improve the control performance, a robust reduced-order method for ADRC is investigated in this paper. Firstly, frequency domain analysis shows that the lower-order extended state observer (ESO) has a smaller disturbance estimation error, so disturbance attenuation capability can be improved by reducing the order of ADRC. However, using only reduced-order ADRC will worsen the robustness of closed-loop systems. Therefore, a robust ADRC method based on a modified noise reduction disturbance observer (MNRDOB) is proposed. The main role of the MNRDOB is to improve the control performance of the closed-loop system by modifying the structure of the controlled object. In addition, the robust stability of the closed-loop control system based on the MNRDOB is discussed. Moreover, some simulations are used to demonstrate the robustness and noise suppression effects of the compound control method reduced-order ADRC with MNRDOB, and the parameter tuning method for the MNRDOB to improve the robustness of the system is given. Finally, some experiments on speed control of a one-dimensional gimbal are performed, and the results show that the proposed method is excellent in overshoot, tracking accuracy, and disturbance attenuation.