Distributed Attitude Consensus Control of Multiple Homogeneous Spacecrafts While Preserving Connectivity

In this paper, a distributed attitude consensus control law has been proposed in the context of multiple homogeneous spacecraft formation flying only through local interactions while the GPS and antenna are denied. One of the engineering problems of implementing the aforementioned spacecraft formation is that some relative measurement sensors, e.g. the camera, have limited field-of-view (FOV). It raises that the maximum relative attitude of any two neighbor spacecrafts in the formation should not be greater than the constant attitude deviation determined by the FOV of these immobile sensors during formation maneuvers and keeping. Our approach to this problem is based on the state-weight strategy for network consensus problems, which has been a little investigated in the literature. We present a leaderless distributed attitude consensus control law such that all the attitudes of the formation flying spacecrafts can globally reach consensus, and the connectivity of the interconnected commination topology is strictly preserved. Throughout this paper, the interconnected communication topology is assumed to be undirected. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the control law. The future research has been discussed in the end.