Attitude Consensus of Multiple Rigid Body Systems by Output Based Adaptive Distributed Output Observer

Abstract

The attitude consensus problem of multiple rigid body systems has been studied via the adaptive distributed observer approach. However, the current adaptive distributed observer needs to recover the full state of the leader system, which leads to a high dimension distributed control law. In this paper, we further solve the same problem by utilizing the recently developed output based adaptive distributed output observer. The new approach has the advantages that it only relies on the output instead of the state of the target system and the dimension of the resultant control law can be significantly lower than that of the existing adaptive distributed observer based control laws.