Attitude coordination control of spacecraft formation flying using rotation matrix

We investigate the attitude coordination control of spacecraft formation flying associated with time-varying reference attitude tracking. The proposed control scheme is directly developed on special orthogonal group(SO(3)) to avoid ambiguities and singularities associated with the attitude representation of Rodrigues parameters or quaternions. The controller is presented by using a novel attitude error based on SO(3). Strict stability analysis is performed with the proper Lyapunov function. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.