Distributed Attitude Synchronization Control for Multiple Flexible Spacecraft Using Adaptive Sliding Mode

This paper investigates the distributed attitude synchronization and tracking problem for a group of flexible spacecraft in the presence of external disturbances. The spacecraft formation is studied in an undirected leader-following architecture and the time-varying reference attitude is represented by a dynamic virtual leader. Applying the adaptive sliding mode mechanism, a distributed modified Rodriguez parameters-based synchronization control law is proposed for flexible spacecraft without using the elastic vibration modes. It is proved that the attitude synchronization can be achieved asymptotically under the control algorithm through the Lyapunov's stability analysis. A numerical simulation example of multiple flexible spacecraft formation is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.