Leader-Following Attitude Consensus for Spacecraft Formation with Rigid and Flexible Spacecraft

摘要

In this Note, the problem of attitude consensus for spacecraft formation with a leader-following architecture has been investigated. The spacecraft formation consists of rigid and flexible spacecraft, and the desired attitude is allowed to be available to only a subset of the spacecraft. Based on the backstepping design, the angular velocity has been first taken as a virtual control. Using graph theory, a distributed attitude cooperative control law has been proposed. Under the control law, the attitudes of all spacecraft can reach synchronization and track the desired attitude. Meanwhile, the induced vibrations by flexible appendages for flexible spacecraft can be damped out at the same time. Finally, the control torque has been designed such that the virtual angular velocity can be tracked by the real angular velocity. Numerical simulations have been presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method. Future work includes how to relax the imposed assumptions (communication topology and constant desired attitude) in this Note, studying the robustness problem with model uncertainties, and conducting experimental research.