Event-based coordinated control of spacecraft formation flying under limited communication

This paper investigates the relative position coordinated control problem for a group of formation flying spacecraft under a directed communication network and resource constraints. An event-based coordinated control scheme without resorting to neighbors’ velocity information is proposed to achieve the formation-keeping maneuvers. Considering expensive communication cost in spacecraft formation, a novel event-triggered mechanism is developed, where the information transmission among spacecraft is established only when the defined triggering threshold is exceeded; moreover, each spacecraft only needs to compute its own control command at triggering time instants, thus ameliorating the issue of computation limitation inherent in the space-qualified microprocessor. Apart from the above, an explicit positive lower bound on the inter-event time internals is rigorously guaranteed such that no Zeno behavior exhibits. By resorting to the input-to-state practical stability and Lyapunov theory, a sufficient criterion on parameters selection is derived to ensure that the overall closed-loop system is uniformly ultimately bounded stable. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.