Distributed Robust Formation Flying and Attitude Synchronization of Spacecraft

This paper considers the spacecraft formation flying (SFF) with a desired attitude. Two control problems are studied. One is the formation control of multiple spacecraft and the other is the attitude synchronization of multiple spacecraft. To solve the two problems, a 6-DOF model is adopted for each spacecraft. In the 6-DOF model, it is assumed that the inertia parameters are not well known and there are perturbations of orbitals, gravity, etc. With the aid of the backstepping technique and the algebraic graph theory, distributed robust control laws are proposed for the formation flying and attitude synchronization problems, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed controllers is shown by simulation.