Leader-following consensus of multiple rigid body systems by a sampled-data distributed observer

Abstract

In this paper, we study the leader-following attitude consensus problem of multiple rigid body systems by a sampled-data distributed observer. Comparing with the continuous-time distributed observer, the sampled-data distributed observer consumes fewer communication resources and is less vulnerable to such communication failures as network congestions and packet dropouts. The sampled-data distributed observer consists of two parts. The first part is a sampled-data distributed observer for the angular velocity leader subsystem and the second part is a sampled-data distributed observer for the attitude leader subsystem. It is noted that, since the attitude leader subsystem is nonlinear, a special effort has to be made to establish the sampled-data distributed observer for the attitude leader subsystem. Moreover, we give an explicit upper bound for the sampling intervals to guarantee the validity of the sampled-data distributed observer. On the basis of the sampled-data distributed observer, we further synthesize a distributed control law to solve the leader-following consensus problem. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated by a numerical example.