Attitude Control of Spacecraft Formations Subject To Distributed Communication Delays

This paper considers the problem of achieving attitude consensus in spacecraft formations with bounded, time-varying communication delays between spacecraft connected as specified by a strongly connected topology. A state feedback controller is proposed and investigated using a time domain approach (via LMIs) and a frequency domain approach (via the small-gain theorem) to obtain delay dependent stability criteria to achieve the desired consensus. Simulations are presented to demonstrate the application of the strategy in a specific scenario.