Self-triggered formation attitude control for multiple spacecraft with disturbances

Abstract

This paper studies the attitude consensus for nonlinear multi-spacecraft systems with disturbances and limited communication bandwidth and computing resources. A dynamic event-based attitude controller is developed to conserve communication resources, where a positive constant term is introduced to improve resource conservation efficiency. The developed event-driven controller is updated according to the constructed triggering mechanism, which greatly reduces the number of computations for the control algorithm. The triggering mechanism does not require continuous state information of neighboring spacecraft, which indicates that continuous communication is not needed for the operation of the formation system. Then, a self-triggered mechanism using the current triggering information is designed to further avoid continuous computation, and the avoidance of logarithmic functions enables the trigger interval to be close to that of the dynamic event-driven algorithm. The formation system is Zeno-free and uniformly ultimately bounded stable under the proposed event-based consensus control framework with the triggering strategies. Finally, simulations exhibit that the dynamic event-triggered protocol can reduce the communication frequency by 88%, and the self-triggered protocol can reduce the communication and computation frequency by 83% and have higher control accuracy than the dynamic event-triggered protocol.