A revolution in spacecraft guidance, navigation and control technology has started with GPS to autonomously provide spacecraft position, attitude and time information. This new technology is being applied to spacecraft constellations to achieve the precision formation flying required for many proposed science and commercial missions. These innovations will also result in significant reductions ...

This paper considers the problem of attitude synchronization for a group of flexible spacecraft based on distributed attitude cooperative control strategy. Based on the backstepping design, non-smooth control, and the neighbor-based design rule, a distributed attitude control law is constructed step by step. Under the proposed control law, it is shown that the attitude synchronization is achiev...

We develop a non-linear tracking control law to be applied to formation flying spacecraft. Each spacecraft in the formation is modeled as a rigid body with N axisymmetric wheels controlled by axial torques, and the kinematics are represented by Modified Rodriques Parameters (MRPs). The paper first derives the open-loop reference attitude, rate, and acceleration commands for tracking a moving ob...

We compare four spacecraft attitude control laws that require no prior modeling of the spacecraft mass distribution. All four control laws are based on rotation matrices, which provide a singularityfree attitude representation and unwinding-free operation without discontinuous switching. We apply these control laws to motion-to-rest and motion-to-spin maneuvers. Simulation results are given to ...

A novel attitude stabilization control scheme is presented for rigid spacecraft. As a stepping stone, a first-order passivity filter is proposed to generate a velocity-related signal from attitude measurements. Then, a velocity-free attitude stabilization controller is synthesized by using a hyperbolic tangent function. It is shown that the controller render the equilibrium points in the closed...

The objective of this paper is to present formation control laws for maintaining the relative attitude between a formation of free ying spacecraft in deep space. The paper presents two control strategies based on leader-following and emergent behavior approaches. The leader-following control has appeared elsewhere and is included for completeness. The main contribution of this paper is a new em...

This investigation is to apply the so-called component synthesis vibration suppression (CSVS) based feed-forward control and the conventional PD feedback control to the vibration control of a flexible spacecraft. The proposed control design process is two fold: design of the attitude controller followed by the design of a flexible vibration attenuator, the feed-forward controller. The Lyapunov ...

This article presents a unified synchronization framework with application to precision formation flying spacecraft. Central to the proposed innovation, in applying synchronization to both translational and rotational dynamics in the Lagrangian form, is the use of the distributed stability and performance analysis tool, called contraction analysis that yields exact nonlinear stability proofs. T...

This paper treats the problem of nonlinear adaptive attitude tracking control of an orbiting flexible spacecraft. It is assumed that the system parameters are unknown and the truncated model of the spacecraft has finite but arbitrary dimension. An adaptive sliding mode control law is derived for a threeaxis stabilized spacecraft attitude tracking control system. The control gains are designed b...