Distributed finite‐time attitude coordination control of spacecraft formations with multiple constraints

Abstract

SummaryThis paper addresses the issue of distributed finite‐time attitude coordination control of spacecraft formations with multiple constraints on angular velocities and control torques. First, the multiple constrained problem is transformed into a bounded issue by virtue of the nonlinear transformation technique and an input saturation model. Next, the nearest neighbor rule is applied to deal with the problem of the unavailability of the leader's information to all followers. Then, a distributed attitude coordination control algorithm is derived to enforce that all attitude tracking errors can converge to a neighborhood around the origin in finite time even when there exist multiple constraints and external disturbances imposed on spacecraft systems. Finally, several numerical simulation examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the derived method.