A Leader-Follower Approach for The Attitude Synchronization of Multiple Rigid Body Systems on $SO(3)$

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed control method for synchronizing the orientations of multiple rigid bodies on SO(3), ensuring almost global stability and allowing only one leader to know the desired attitude.

Contribution

It introduces a leader-follower control strategy with stability guarantees for heterogeneous rigid bodies on SO(3), a novel approach for attitude synchronization.

Findings

Achieves almost global asymptotic stability.

Validates the control strategy through simulations.

Enables synchronization with only one known desired attitude.

Abstract

This paper deals with the leader-follower attitude synchronization problem for a group of heterogeneous rigid body systems on $SO(3)$ under an undirected, connected, and acyclic graph communication topology. The proposed distributed control strategy, endowed with almost global asymptotic stability guarantees, allows the synchronization of the rigid body systems to a constant desired orientation known only to a single rigid body. Some simulation results are also provided to validate the theoretical developments and illustrate the performance of the proposed control strategy.