Distributed passivity-based control for multiple flexible spacecraft with attitude-only measurements

This paper focuses on the leader-follower attitude consensus of multiple under-actuated flexible spacecraft without system damping based on attitude measurements only. By constructing two different kinds of auxiliary Euler-Lagrange systems, passivity-based controllers are designed under undirected or directed communication graphs to achieve the distributed attitude tracking and vibration suppression simultaneously. For the leader-follower consensus under directed graphs, only the controller's generalized coordinates and the spacecraft attitudes are exchanged among the followers with the help of an extended state observer. The Lyapunov theory is adopted for the stability analysis of the overall system. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers. (C) 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.