Relative position coordinated control for spacecraft formation flying with communication delays

This study addresses a relative position coordinated control problem for spacecraft formation flying subject to directed communication topology. Two different kinds of communication delay cases, including time-varying delays and arbitrarily bounded delays are investigated. Using the backstepping control technique, two virtual velocity control inputs are firstly designed to achieve coordinated position tracking for the kinematic subsystem. Furthermore, a hyperbolic tangent function is introduced to guarantee the boundedness of the virtual controller. Then, a finite-time control algorithm is designed for the dynamic subsystem. It can guarantee that the virtual velocity can be followed by the real velocity after finite time. It is theoretically proved that the proposed control scheme can asymptotically stabilize the closed-loop system. Numerical simulations are further presented that not only highlight closed-loop performance benefiting from the proposed control scheme, but also illustrate its superiority in comparison with conventional formation control schemes.