General attitude cooperative control of satellite formation by set stabilization

This paper investigates the problem of general attitude cooperative control for different satellite formation structures from a new perspective of set theory. A virtual single-integral nonlinear node dynamic system is first presented. Then the general satellite attitude cooperative controller can be designed based on the virtual node dynamic system and consensus theory. The stability of the closed-loop system with respect to the goal set is analyzed by integral input to state stable method. Subsequently, two different scenarios, leaderless and leader-following satellite formation structures, are introduced by the general attitude cooperative control scheme. Corresponding simulations of these two scenarios verify the obtained theoretical results.