The leader-following consensus of multiple rigid spacecraft systems

In this paper, we consider the leader-following consensus problem for a multiple rigid body spacecraft system whose attitude is represented by the unit quaternion. Existing results on this problem rely on some restrictive assumptions on the communication graph of the system. By developing a nonlinear distributed observer for the leader system, we solve this problem via a distributed control scheme under the assumption that the information of the leader can reach every follower through a path and the communication between two neighboring followers are bidirectional. Moreover, our result can accommodate a class of desired angular velocities generated by a marginally stable linear autonomous system.