Autonomous attitude coordinated control for spacecraft formation with input constraint, model uncertainties, and external disturbances

To synchronize the attitude of a spacecraft formation flying system, three novel autonomous control schemes are proposed to deal with the issue in this paper. The first one is an ideal autonomous attitude coordinated controller, which is applied to address the case with certain models and no disturbance. The second one is a robust adaptive attitude coordinated controller, which aims to tackle the case with external disturbances and model uncertainties. The last one is a filtered robust adaptive attitude coordinated controller, which is used to overcome the case with input constraint, model uncertainties, and external disturbances. The above three controllers do not need any external tracking signal and only require angular velocity and relative orientation between a spacecraft and its neighbors. Besides, the relative information is represented in the body frame of each spacecraft. The controllers are proved to be able to result in asymptotical stability almost everywhere. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed three approaches are effective for attitude coordination in a spacecraft formation flying system.