Finite-time attitude consensus control for multiple rigid spacecraft based on distributed observers

The problem of attitude consensus control is addressed for multiple rigid spacecraft under a fixed interaction network where only a subset of followers can obtain the leader's state information. To estimate the attitude and angular velocity of the leader, a group of distributed finite-time observers is constructed for each follower. Then fast non-singular terminal sliding mode attitude controllers are proposed for followers based on the observed information. Rigorous proofs are presented to show the finite-time attitude consensus performance of the closed-loop multiple rigid spacecraft systems under the proposed consensus protocol including distributed observers and attitude controllers. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed attitude consensus protocol.