Leaderless attitude synchronization control of multiple flexible spacecraft on SO(3)

Area of Science:

• Aerospace Engineering
• Control Systems Theory
• Robotics

Background:

• Spacecraft attitude synchronization is crucial for multi-agent space missions.
• Existing methods often struggle with flexible spacecraft dynamics and leaderless configurations.
• Communication topology significantly impacts distributed control system performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop adaptive controllers for leaderless attitude synchronization of multiple flexible spacecraft on the special orthogonal group SO(3).
• To address scenarios with both arbitrary and near-zero final angular velocities.
• To ensure robustness against external disturbances and guarantee boundedness of flexible vibrations.

Main Methods:

• Design of distributed observers using smooth mapping from Euclidean space (ℝ^3x3) to the Lie group SO(3) for reference attitude generation.
• Development of adaptive continuous controllers on SO(3) for leaderless synchronization.
• Rigorous mathematical proofs to demonstrate convergence of the control strategies.
• Validation through numerical simulations.

Main Results:

• Successful leaderless attitude synchronization of multiple flexible spacecraft under various communication topologies with spanning trees.
• Controllers effectively handle external disturbances while maintaining bounded flexible vibrations.
• Demonstrated convergence of the proposed adaptive control methods.

Conclusions:

• The proposed adaptive control strategies are effective for leaderless attitude synchronization of flexible spacecraft.
• The methods provide a robust solution for coordinated multi-spacecraft operations in the presence of disturbances and vibrations.
• The use of observers on SO(3) facilitates reliable attitude reference generation.