Finite-time consensus control for multiple spacecraft systems under directed communication topology

This paper addresses a distributed finite-time consensus control problem for multiple spacecraft systems under a directed communication topology. Firstly, we propose a finite-time consensus protocol to deal with the finite-time static consensus problem for multiple spacecraft systems. Based on finite-time Lyapunov theory, it is theoretically shown that the states of the spacecraft can achieve static consensus in finite time, that is all spacecraft attitudes converge to a common value and angular velocities converge to zero. Furthermore, the present control algorithm is extended to solve the finite-time dynamic consensus problem for multiple spacecraft systems, that is all spacecraft states converge to the desired dynamic value. The effectiveness of the results is also illustrated by numerical simulations.