Finite‐time attitude consensus control for multiple rigid spacecraft based on distributed observers

The problem of attitude consensus control is addressed for multiple rigid spacecraft under a fixed interaction network where only a subset of followers can obtain the leader's state information. To estimate the attitude and angular velocity of the leader, a group of distributed finite‐time observers is constructed for each follower. Then fast non‐singular terminal sliding mode attitude controllers are proposed for followers based on the observed information. Rigorous proofs are presented to show the finite‐time attitude consensus performance of the closed‐loop multiple rigid spacecraft systems under the proposed consensus protocol including distributed observers and attitude controllers. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed attitude consensus protocol.