Decentralized attitude synchronization tracking control for multiple spacecraft under directed communication topology

This paper studies the attitude synchronization tracking control of spacecraft formation flying with a directed communication topology and presents three different controllers. By introduc-ing a novel error variable associated with rotation matrix, a decentralized attitude synchronization controller, which could obtain almost global asymptotical stability of the closed-loop system, is developed. Then, considering model uncertainties and unknown external disturbances, we propose a robust adaptive attitude synchronization controller by designing adaptive laws to estimate the unknown parameters. After that, the third controller is proposed by extending this method to the case of time-varying communication delays via Lyapunov–Krasovskii analysis. The distinctive feature of this work is to address attitude coordinated control with model uncertainties, unknown disturbances and time-varying delays in a decentralized framework, with a strongly connected direc-ted information flow. It is shown that tracking and synchronization of an arbitrary desired attitude can be achieved when the stability condition is satisfied. Simulation results are provided to demon-strate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.