Distributed Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Attitude Tracking of Multiple Spacecraft

This paper considers the distributed attitude tracking problem of multiple spacecraft with disturbances and unknown inertia matrices. Based on the relative attitudes and angular velocities of neighboring spacecraft, we design a distributed robust controller to each follower to guarantee that the attitude errors between the followers and the leader converge to zero for any communication graph containing a directed spanning tree with the leader as the root. To deal with the problem of parameters uncertainties, we further propose a distributed adaptive sliding mode controller, under which the system is globally robust with respect to external disturbances and inertia matrices uncertainties.