Distributed Adaptive Attitude Synchronization of Multiple Spacecraft

TL;DR

This paper proposes distributed adaptive control strategies for multiple spacecraft to achieve attitude synchronization, even with unknown inertia matrices, using leaderless and leader-following communication topologies.

Contribution

It introduces novel distributed adaptive controllers for spacecraft attitude synchronization with unknown inertias, applicable to leaderless and leader-following scenarios.

Findings

Controllers successfully synchronize spacecraft attitudes in simulations.

The methods work with directed spanning tree communication topologies.

Effective tracking of reference attitude demonstrated in examples.

Abstract

This paper addresses the distributed attitude synchronization problem of multiple spacecraft with unknown inertia matrices. Two distributed adaptive controllers are proposed for the cases with and without a virtual leader to which a time-varying reference attitude is assigned. The first controller achieves attitude synchronization for a group of spacecraft with a leaderless communication topology having a directed spanning tree. The second controller guarantees that all spacecraft track the reference attitude if the virtual leader has a directed path to all other spacecraft. Simulation examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the results.