Robust Attitude Coordination Control for Spacecraft Formation Flying Under Actuator Failures

This paper examines attitude coordination control for spacecraft formation flying. A class of distributed adaptive fault-tolerant attitude coordination control laws is proposed. The proposed control laws do not require online identification of failures. Using the Lyapunov approach and graph theory, it is shown that the control laws guarantee a group of spacecraft that simultaneously track a common time-varying reference attitude, even when the reference attitude is available only to a subset of the members of a group. Finally, numerical simulation is presented to show that the distributed controller is successful in achieving high-attitude tracking and synchronization performance, even in the presence of an unknown mass moment of inertia matrix, bounded external disturbances, actuator failures, and control saturation limits.