Attitude Coordination Control for Spacecraft with Disturbances and Event-Triggered Communication

In this article, a novel distributed attitude coordination control scheme is proposed for a group of rigid spacecraft with unknown disturbances. The communication topology is described by a general directed graph, and the leader's attitude is available to only a small fraction of followers. Different from existing attitude coordination control schemes, here an event-triggered communication strategy without Zeno phenomenon is designed, which avoids continuous communication between neighboring spacecraft and considerably reduces the communication burden. Moreover, a nonlinear observer is constructed for each follower, which enables us to estimate and compensate for a large class of disturbances exactly. The proposed scheme is able to ensure the boundedness of all closed-loop signals and steer the attitude tracking errors into an arbitrarily small residual set, regardless of the intermittent communication. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.