Distributed adaptive attitude synchronization for spacecraft formation flying with sampled-data information flows

This paper investigates the adaptive attitude synchronization problem of spacecraft formation flying in the presence of unknown parameters and external disturbances. Specifically, by introducing the “sampled-data information flow” concept, a novel distributed control strategy is developed, which is more reliable and practical in the applications. Moreover, the velocity information is not required to be exchanged, such that the communication network load can be further reduced. Based on input-to-state stability, sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee that the attitude synchronization can be achieved under directed topology. An important and distinctive feature of the proposed method consists in the fact that it can effectively reduce the energy consumption for the spacecraft formation flying due to more efficient utilization of the communication network resources. Finally, a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and the benefit of our proposed method.