Adaptive fault-tolerant attitude tracking control for spacecraft formation with unknown inertia

In this paper, an adaptive fault-tolerant attitude coordinated tracking problem for spacecraft formation is investigated under a directed communication topology containing a spanning tree with the leader as the root, where inertia matrices and external disturbances are unknown time-varying. With no prior knowledge of faults and inertia, an adaptive approach is proposed to reject the influence of disturbances and uncertainties. Meanwhile, combining with a consensus algorithm and graph theory, an adaptive fault-tolerant attitude synchronization tracking control law is presented to regulate the attitude to a common time-varying reference state. Aiming at optimizing the control law, a dynamic adjustment function is introduced to adjust the control gain according to the attitude tracking error. The effectiveness of the proposed control approach is demonstrated through simulation results.