Decentralized adaptive attitude synchronization control for spacecraft formation using nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode

This paper studies the attitude synchronization control problem for a group of spacecraft. Considering inertia uncertainties and external disturbances with unknown bounds, a decentralized adaptive control scheme is developed using nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode (NFTSM). A multispacecraft NFTSM is firstly designed, which contains the advantages of the nonsingular terminal sliding mode and the traditional linear sliding mode together. Then, the continuous decentralized adaptive NFTSM control laws with boundary layer by employing NFTSM associated with novel adaptive architecture are proposed, which can eliminate the chattering, and guarantee the attitude tracking errors converge to the regions containing the origin in finite time. At last, numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed control strategy.