Distributed Back-Stepping Consensus Protocol for Attitude Synchronization and Tracking on Undirected Graphs

This paper investigates the attitude synchronization and tracking problem for multiple spacecraft with an arbitrary differentiable reference. Considering the reference as a leader, the attitude synchronization and tracking problem is then transformed into a leader-following problem. Based on the quaternion representation of the attitude, the attitude tracking error dynamics and kinematics are derived. Treating the dynamics and kinematics as two cascaded subsystems, a back-stepping consensus protocol is designed, and its stability is analyzed using Lyapunov theorem. The proposed protocol is fully distributed since only the local and neighboring information are used. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.