Decentralized adaptive control for attitude synchronization of multiple spacecraft via quantized information exchange

This paper investigates the problem of decentralized attitude synchronization and tracking for a group of spacecraft, whose communication topology is undirected, subject to inter-spacecraft communication resources constraints, model uncertainties and external disturbances. In order to reduce inter-spacecraft communication burden, a quantization mechanism is developed. In the quantization mechanism, the quantized sequences, whose storage size are much smaller than that of spacecraft's attitude information, are required to be transmitted among spacecraft only when the quantized sequences changes compared with the previous one. Thus, the size of inter-spacecraft communication data can be greatly reduced. A decentralized adaptive attitude synchronization and tracking control scheme is proposed to align spacecraft's attitude and track the desired attitude. By resorting to Barbalat's Lemma, the resulting closed-loop system is proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded stable. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.