Hybrid triggering design for global attitude synchronization of networked rigid bodies

This paper is devoted to dealing with the problem of global attitude synchronization for quaternion-based multiple rigid bodies, regardless of the general directed topologies of networks and arbitrary initial orientations of rigid bodies. A novel canonical quaternion is constructed to represent all physical attitudes of rigid bodies such that the pseudo-synchronization of their quaternion representations (namely, the quaternions' vector parts of all rigid bodies reach agreement on some identical value, whereas their scalar parts do not) can be precluded. Moreover, to reduce unnecessary communication requirements of rigid bodies, a hybrid triggering mechanism involving both the time regulation and neighbors' non-real-time information is proposed, with which a distributed protocol is developed by leveraging the constructed canonical quaternion. It is shown that the presented protocol for rigid bodies over directed networks can simultaneously realize the global attitude synchronization and naturally exclude the Zeno behavior. In addition, these observations are also validated via the application of our hybrid triggering protocol to networked spacecraft.