Laplacian cooperative attitude control of multiple rigid bodies

Motivated by the fact that linear controllers can stabilize the rotational motion of a rigid body, we propose in this paper a control strategy that exploits graph theoretic tools for cooperative control of multiple rigid bodies. The control objective is to stabilize the system to a configuration where the rigid bodies will have a common orientation and common angular velocity. The control law respects the limited information each rigid body has with respect to the rest of the team. Specifically, each rigid body is equipped with a control law that is based on the Laplacian matrix of the communication graph, which encodes the limited communication capabilities between the team members. Similarly to the linear case, the convergence of the multi-agent system relies on the connectivity of the communication graph