Leader-following attitude consensus of multiple rigid body systems subject to jointly connected switching networks

Abstract

The leader-following attitude consensus problem of multiple rigid body systems has been studied by the distributed observer approach. The key assumption in the existing results is that the communication network among the rigid body systems is static and connected. Nevertheless, this assumption is undesirable since, typically, the communication network is time-varying and disconnected from time to time due to changes of the environment or failures of some subsystems. In this paper, we will further study the leader-following attitude consensus problem of multiple rigid body systems subject to a jointly connected switching communication network. This new problem is more challenging than the existing one since a jointly connected switching communication network can be disconnected at every time instant. To overcome the difficulty, we first show that the distributed observer for a nonlinear target system subject to a jointly connected switching communication network exists. Then, we further synthesize a distributed control law utilizing this distributed observer for the multiple rigid body systems. Finally, we show that this distributed control law solves our problem through the argument of the certainty equivalence principle.