Coordinated Multiple Spacecraft Attitude Control with Communication Time Delays and Uncertainties

In this paper, we consider the coordinated attitude control problem of spacecraft formation with communication delays, model and disturbance uncertainties, and propose novel synchronized control schemes. Since the attitude motion is essential in non-Euclidean space, thus, unlike the existing designs which describe the delayed relative attitude via linear algorithm, we treat the attitude error and the local relative attitude on the nonlinear manifold-Lie group, and attempt to obtain coupling attitude information by the natural quaternion multiplication. Our main focus is to address two problems: 1) Propose a coordinated attitude controller to achieve the synchronized attitude maneuver, i.e., synchronize multiple spacecraft attitudes and track a time-varying desired attitude; 2) With known model information, we achieve the synchronized attitude maneuver with disturbances under angular velocity constraints. Especially, if the formation does not have any uncertainties, the designer can simply set the controller via an appropriate choice of control gains to avoid system actuator saturation. Our controllers are proposed based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method and simulation of a spacecraft formation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoretical results.