Distributed fixed-time attitude coordination control for multiple rigid spacecraft

In this paper, the fixed-time attitude coordination control for multiple rigid spacecraft under an undirected communication graph is investigated. By using the backstepping technique, the distributed fixed-time observer, and the method of adding a power integrator, a distributed fixed-time attitude coordination control law is designed for a group of spacecraft. The proposed control scheme is nonsingular and can guarantee a group of rigid spacecraft simultaneously tracking a common desired attitude within fixed time even when the time-varying reference attitude is available only to a subset of the group members. Rigorous analysis is provided to show that the attitude consensus tracking errors can converge to the origin in finite time which is bounded by a fixed constant independent of initial conditions. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.