Leader-following consensus of multiple spacecraft systems with disturbance rejection over switching networks by adaptive learning control

In this article, we study the leader-following attitude consensus and disturbance rejection problem of multiple uncertain rigid spacecraft systems over jointly connected switching networks. In contrast with the previous work, which can only handle disturbances in the form of step functions and trigonometric functions via the internal model approach, we allow the disturbances to be any bounded unknown time functions. Moreover, instead of static and connected communication networks, we can handle jointly connected switching networks, which can be disconnected at all time. These improvements are due to the integration of two techniques, namely, the adaptive distributed observer technique and the adaptive learning control technique. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated by two numerical examples.