Multi-spacecraft attitude cooperative control using model-based event-triggered methodology

The attitude cooperative control of multi-spacecraft under undirected information flow is studied in this paper based on a novel state-irrelevant event-triggered control (ETC) strategy. In the proposed algorithm, the control updating and data-transfer among spacecraft need only be executed when certain conditions are triggered. Then, the system model is utilized to predict the future state based on the last transmission and to calculate the time of the next transmission event. Firstly, the proposed algorithm reduces the control updating frequency remarkably and avoids continuous communication; secondly, each spacecraft updates its controller independently, without requiring all members to update simultaneously; thirdly, it is still effective in the presence of input limitation. The consensus can be guaranteed under such control strategy. It has proved that there exists a lower bound for the update interval, avoiding a phenomenon that the infinite number of events may appear in a finite time interval, also called the Zeno phenomenon. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is verified via simulations.