Finite-Time Attitude Consensus Tracking Control of Multiple Spacecraft Systems With Input Quantization and Actuator Faults

This paper investigates the finite-time attitude consensus tracking problem for multiple spacecraft systems in the presence of input quantization, external disturbances and actuator faults. First, the input quantization is decomposed into a combination of a linear term and a disturbance-like term. Then, by integrating the “adding a power integrator” technique with the adaptive bound estimation approach, a finite-time attitude consensus protocol is proposed under the hypothesis that the time-varying reference attitude is available only to a subset of the follower spacecrafts. It is shown that the proposed attitude consensus control law can guarantee a group of spacecrafts to simultaneously track a common time-varying reference attitude in finite time despite the presence of input quantization and actuator faults. Remarkably, the proposed attitude consensus control scheme does not require the upper bounds of the time varying faults and external disturbances to be known, and also allows the parameters of quantizer to be freely adjusted according to system performance. Finally, simulation studies are carried out to validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.