Finite-time attitude control of multiple rigid spacecraft using terminal sliding mode

This paper investigates the control problem of finite-time attitude synchronization and tracking for a group of rigid spacecraft in the presence of environmental disturbances. A new fast terminal sliding manifold is developed for multiple spacecraft formation flying under the undirected graph topology. On the basis of the finite-time control and adaptive control strategies, two novel decentralized finite-time control laws are proposed to force the spacecraft attitude error dynamics to converge to small regions in finite time, and adaptive control is applied to reject the disturbance. The finite-time convergence and stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed by Lyapunov theory. Simulation examples are provided to illustrate the feasibility of the control algorithm. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.