Robust adaptive attitude synchronisation of rigid body networks on SO(3)

In this study, the authors consider the robust adaptive attitude synchronisation problem for a network of rigid body agents using a modified version of the error function, which is recently introduced for constructing the attitude errors on SO(3). These attitude error vectors are particularly useful for networks with large initial attitude difference. They focus on devising an adaptive geometric approach to cope with situations where the inertia matrices are not available for measurement. The Frobenious norm is used as a measure for the difference between the actual values of moments of inertias and their estimated values, to construct the individual adaptive laws of agents. Compared to the previous methods for synchronisation on SO(3) such as those using quaternions, the authors´ approach based on the introduced modified error function enables us to avoid any ambiguity for attitude representation. Finally, they study the robustness of the synchronisation task in the presence of external disturbances and unmodelled dynamics and propose a method to attenuate such effects. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.