Distributed attitude control for multiple spacecraft with communication delays

The work presented here considers the attitude synchronization problem for a group of spacecraft in the presence of communication delays. Based on the backstepping control and finite-time control techniques, a novel nonsmooth distributed cooperative attitude control algorithm is proposed for multiple spacecraft with attitude described by quaternion. Rigorous proof shows that attitude synchronization can be achieved asymptotically under the proposed control law if the communication topology graph among the spacecraft is strongly connected. Finally, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.