Distributed dynamic event-triggered adaptive attitude consensus control of multiple spacecraft

This paper addresses the issue of distributed attitude consensus control for a group of rigid spacecraft with bounded external disturbances and inter-spacecraft communication bandwidth constraint. By developing a model-based dynamic event-triggered communication mechanism, attitude information of spacecraft is sent to their neighbors only when a defined event is triggered. To suppress the effect of the errors induced by the event-triggered mechanism on the multi-spacecraft system, a model-based state estimator is employed to estimate the attitude of the neighbors during the event-triggered intervals. By using the estimated attitude, a distributed event-triggered adaptive attitude consensus control scheme is proposed to achieve the attitude consensus tracking of a group of spacecraft. Furthermore, only a small subset of spacecraft can obtain the reference attitude, and the other spacecraft that cannot obtain the reference attitude information directly just uses the attitude information of their neighbors to track the reference attitude trajectory. The communication topology among spacecraft is assumed to be undirected. The Lyapunov approach is employed to guarantee the stability of the resulting closed-loop systems, and the Zeno phenomenon is excluded. Finally, the results of numerical simulation illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme.