Coordinated Attitude Control of Spacecraft Formation Without Angular Velocity Feedback: A Decentralized Approach

In this paper, motivated by recent developments of velocity-free spacecraft (SC) attitude control techniques and behavioral-based SC formation control a decentralized control algorithm for attitude coordination of SC formation without angular velocity feedback is presented. Asymptotic stability of the SC formation is guaranteed by using Lyapunov analysis and LaSalle’s theorem. The advantage of our proposed algorithm is that it requires limited information exchange among the SC in the formation (only attitude information exchange is necessary). Additionally, the proposed algorithm can be extremely useful when angular velocity information of the SC in the formation in not available due to sensor failures or communication constraints. Unlike other popular methods in the robotics area which tend to assume simple dynamics such as linear systems and single or double integrator dynamic models, in this paper, the full nonlinear attitude dynamics of the SC is considered to track fast time-varying reference trajectories.