Distributed finite-time attitude tracking control for modular spacecraft systems

This paper addresses the distributed finite-time attitude tracking control problem for modular spacecraft systems under a directed communication topology. a distributed continuous finite-time estimator for the each following spacecraft is designed to estimate the leader spacecraft angular velocity in the case that the leader spacecraft reference state may only be available to a part of the following spacecraft. Furthermore, based on the fast terminal sliding mode contained the state of neighboring spacecraft, we propose and a model-independent distributed finite-time adaptive tracking control algorithm to deal with modeling uncertainties and external disturbances. The effectiveness of the results is also illustrated by numerical simulations.