Attitude coordination of deep space formation flying via virtual structure

An attitude coordination control strategy is proposed for deep space formation flying attitude maneuver. The formation is treated as a rigid body via virtual structure. Hierarchical architecture is introduced to deal with the multi-level control of virtual structure and formation spacecrafts. Combining with the attitude motion of the virtual structure, the desired attitude motion trajectories of formation spacecrafts are obtained for attitude control systems. To improve the robustness, a sliding mode control low is designed in the local attitude tracking controller to track the desired attitude trajectory. Finally, a numerical simulation of three spacecrafts deep space formation flying is employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.