Robust attitude coordination control of multiple-team spacecraft formation under control input saturation

This paper presents a robust attitude coordination methodology for multiple-team spacecraft formation(MTSF) in presence of control input saturation. The main idea is to construct a novel sliding mode surface with a tunable vector having the following two properties: 1) the gradient of the tunable vector is related to saturation constraints; 2) the tunable vector has consensus-like property related to the formation's communication topology. The robustness against matched perturbations and the stability of the formation system are proven by Lyapunov theory. Moreover, we give extensions of our control method to the case with multiple communication delays by solving linear matrix inequalities(LMIs) to choose control parameters properly. Finally, simulation results are presented for attitude coordination for 3-teams spacecraft formation.