Distributed attitude synchronization control of multi-agent systems with time-varying topologies

This paper addresses the attitude synchronization problem of multiple rigid body agents in SO(3) with directed and switching interconnection topologies. Using the axis-angle representation of the orientation, a distributed controller based on differences between the orientations of agents in a global frame is proposed. In the case of the balanced interconnection graph, the attitude synchronization is achieved with the well-known mild assumption (that is, uniform joint strong connection). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme, an illustrative example is provided.