Self-Triggered 6-DOF Formation Control for Multispacecraft Systems With Restricted Communication and Computation Resources

The 6-DOF event-based formation control issue for multispacecraft systems considering unknown disturbances is investigated. First, a 6-DOF coupling dynamics is given, and a 6-DOF dynamic event-driven formation controller is designed to achieve stability and avoid continuous data transmission. The formation spacecraft updates its controller and transmits its states at the trigger instants. Further, a self-triggered function using triggering states to calculate the next triggering moment is designed to save computing resources. It should be noted that the logarithmic function does not need to be used in the computation of the next trigger moment, significantly improving resource conservation's effectiveness. Furthermore, the developed 6-DOF event-driven controllers make the system bounded stable and Zeno-free. Finally, simulations present that the self-triggered mechanism avoids the continuous computation of the trigger function while reducing the communication resource-saving efficiency by only 7% compared with the dynamic trigger mechanism.