Distributed adaptive attitude synchronization of multiple spacecraft with external disturbances

This paper considers the distributed attitude synchronization problem for multiple spacecraft with external disturbances. Distributed discontinuous adaptive controller is designed based on the relative attitudes and angular velocities of neighboring spacecraft and attitude synchronization can be reached for any communication graph containing a directed spanning tree. To tackle the chattering effect caused by the discontinuous controller, a continuous controller is further proposed, under which both the synchronization errors and the adaptive gains are ultimately bounded. Extensions to the case with a leader-follower communication graph with the leader as the spanning tree´s root are further studied.