Practical predefined-time attitude coordination control for multiple rigid spacecraft

Abstract

This paper investigates the practical predefined-time attitude cooperation control problem for a group of rigid spacecraft under an undirected communication graph. First, since the leader is accessible to only a subset of the group members, a distributed practical predefined-time state observer is proposed to estimate the leader’s states by using a time-varying scaling function. Second, a distributed practical predefined-time attitude coordination controller is designed to guarantee that the attitude tracking errors of all follower spacecraft converge to the neighborhood of the origin within a preset time. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control law is demonstrated by illustrative numerical examples.