Distributed Coordinated Attitude Regulation Control for Multiple Spacecraft with Time-varying Uncertainties

Abstract

For multiple spacecrafts under the communication topology containing a spanning tree with the leader as the root, we investigate a distributed coordinated attitude regulation control problem of the spacecraft with unknown time-varying uncertainties and state-dependent disturbances. Aiming at solving the practical problem that the information of the leader may be only available to a subset of the followers, a novel class of distributed finite-time leaders’ state observer for each follower is proposed. Meanwhile, a new self-adjustment matrix is designed to reduce the overshoot of the system. In addition, an adaptive compensation term is designed to reject the impact of the time-varying inertia uncertainties and external state-dependent and state-independent disturbances. On the basis of the distributed finite-time observer, the self-adjustment matrix and the adaptive law, two distributed coordinated attitude regulation control laws are designed. With the first controller, the coordinated attitude regulation system is stable asymptotically, and with the second controller, the system is bounded stable. Both distributed coordinated attitude regulation controllers can guarantee that the follower spacecraft can track a common time-varying trajectory of the leader. Numerical simulation examples validate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.