Synchronized Multiple Spacecraft Rotations: A Revisit in the Context of Consensus Building

The problem of synchronized multiple spacecraft rotations is revisited in the context of the emergent consensus building paradigm. We propose control laws so that multiple spacecraft can maintain given (time-varying) relative attitudes and angular velocities during formation maneuvers. We also propose control laws to guarantee that multiple spacecraft can track a given (time-varying) reference attitude when the reference attitude is only available to a part of the team members. The proposed control laws for reference attitude tracking allow information to flow from any spacecraft to any other spacecraft to introduce information feedback between neighbors, which generalizes the leader-follower approach in the literature. Simulation results on reference attitude tracking are presented to validate our approach.