Distributed Event-Triggered Attitude Consensus Control for Spacecraft Formation Flying With Unknown Disturbances and Uncertainties

This article investigates the event-triggered attitude cooperative control problem for spacecraft formation flying subject to unknown external disturbances and model uncertainties. Considering that only a subset of formation spacecraft have access to the desired state information, a distributed event-triggered control strategy is proposed to achieve attitude synchronization. The proposed controller is only updated when the triggering condition is satisfied, which greatly reduces the frequency of the controller update. It is shown that the trajectories of state errors are able to remain in a small region around the origin. Subsequently, in order to decrease energy consumption and computational burden, an event-triggered mechanism that only requires the last neighbors’ state information is designed. It has been proved that the triggering interval has a strictly positive lower bound, which ensures that Zeno behavior can be avoided. Finally, numerical simulations are come out to verify the effectiveness of the developed control law.