Fractional‐order sliding mode attitude coordinated control for spacecraft formation flying with unreliable wireless communication

This paper investigates the coordinated attitude control problem with fractional order sliding mode control theory for spacecraft formation flying by considering of unknown disturbance, inertia uncertainty, partial loss of actuators, and communication delay. Two types of fractional order sliding mode control laws are proposed to solve the considered design problem. The first one is based on the Chebyshev neural network technique, and the second one is involved with the integral‐type and super‐twisting sliding mode control methods. Compared to traditional sliding mode control methods, the developed fractional order sliding mode control strategies can achieve a faster convergence speed. Simulation results based on a group of three spacecrafts are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed coordinated attitude control approaches.