Distributed adaptive event-triggered control for attitude synchronization of multiple spacecraft

This paper investigates the problem of attitude synchronization tracking of multiple spacecraft in the presence of limited inter-spacecraft communication, model uncertainties and external disturbances. A distributed adaptive event-triggered control scheme for attitude synchronization tracking of multiple spacecraft is proposed. In the proposed control scheme, the controllers are updated in an aperiodic manner at the event-sampled instants when a defined event-triggered error exceeds a state-dependent threshold. The inter-spacecraft communication topology in the control scheme is assumed to be undirected. The stability of the resulting closed-loop systems can be guaranteed by application of the Lyapunov function, and no accumulation of triggering instants is also ensured. Finally, simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.