Abstract
The attitude synchronizing of formation flying spacecrafts is an essential ingredient in almost all practical situations. However, thus far no control scheme was proposed for synchronizing the attitude of multiple spacecraft without a prescribed reference attitude in the presence of disturbance torques and limited communication topology. A decentralized robust attitude control law is proposed in order to guarantee spacecraft attitude synchronization under external disturbances in the absence of a common reference attitude or any other hierarchy in the formation. The proposed controller is effective with a large range of communication topologies and is designed using the absolute angular velocity and attitude quaternion. The control scheme is robust against environmental disturbance torques. The convergence and stability of the proposed controller for the resulting closed-loop system are proven theoretically. Numerical simulations are included to validate the analytical results.
Highlights
In recent years, spacecraft formation flying (SFF) has been extensively studied due to the fact that substituting a single large spacecraft by a swarm of simpler intercommunicating satellites may offer significant programmatic and scientific benefits.[1]
Attitude synchronization is a pertinent for SFF applications such as spaceborne interferometry and synthetic-aperture imaging.[1,2,3]
Since the environmental disturbances play an important role in the attitude control, the goal of this research is to design decentralized attitude control laws that are robust under various disturbances and can steer the attitude states of the spacecraft formation to achieve synchronization asymptotically, without any leader or reference attitude
Summary
Spacecraft formation flying (SFF) has been extensively studied due to the fact that substituting a single large spacecraft by a swarm of simpler intercommunicating satellites may offer significant programmatic and scientific benefits.[1]. Control for attitude synchronization can be separated into centralized or decentralized control.[4] The former is fault-sensitive because the control instructions are generated by a single satellite whose failure can lead to the paralysis of the whole formation system. The latter, obtains superior faulttolerance because the control of each spacecraft within the formation is based on local information, and the global control objective is achieved by the local control of each satellite. The failure of a single satellite will not lead to the destabilization of the entire system
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