Distributed fixed‐time attitude coordination control for multiple rigid spacecraft

Summary 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.