Distributed Attitude Coordination Control for Multiple Flexible Spacecraft with Communication Delays
Yongxia Shi, Qinglei Hu · 2019
This paper addresses the attitude synchronization problem for multiple flexible spacecraft subject to directed communication topology. Taking the time delays of communication network into account, a distributed attitude coordination control scheme is proposed only through local information exchange. It is shown that the control law can not only guarantee that all spacecraft within a formation can track a common reference attitude synchronously, but also ensure the undesirable vibration induced by flexible attachments are perfectly suppressed even when only a subset of formation members have access to the reference attitude. The result is rigorously proved by resorting to the Lyapunov stability analysis and algebraic graph theory. Finally, simulation examples for attitude synchronization among three flexible spacecraft are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.