Event-triggered and consensus-based attitude tracking alignment for discrete-time multiple spacecraft system exploiting interference

This paper presents a discrete-time attitude control strategy with equi-global practical stabilizability for aligning the attitude of multiple spacecraft to a predesigned configuration according to a time-variant reference. By utilizing the interference of the wireless channel, the communication scheme designed in this paper can save communication resources, amount of computation, and energy proportionally to the number of spacecraft. The exact discrete-time model and approximate discrete-time model of the consensus-based spacecraft tracking system are given. Then the framework for the design of an event-triggered control scheme for the exact discrete-time system via its approximate models is developed, which avoids the periodic actuation, and Zeno behavior is proved to be excluded. Furthermore, the control scheme can handle the presence of the unknown fading channel. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the control strategy.