Satellite Formation-Containment Control Emphasis on Collision Avoidance and Uncertainty Suppression

This article explores an adaptive robust control scheme for satellite formation-containment flying in a way of constraint following. For safe flight and uncertainty suppression, both collision avoidance and uncertainty suppression are addressed. First, for uncertainty suppression, (possibly fast) time-varying but bounded uncertainty is considered, and then an adaptive law is proposed to estimate the comprehensive uncertainty bounds online. Second, the problem of formation-containment control with collision avoidance is converted into another problem of constraint-following control by taking the objectives of collision avoidance, formation, and containment, respectively, as the collision-avoidance constraint, formation constraint, and containment constraint. Third, an \eta -measure is introduced to gauge the constraint-following error, and then an adaptive robust control is proposed to render the error to be uniformly bounded and uniformly ultimately bounded, regardless of the uncertainty. By this, the satellites can follow the above collision-avoidance constraint, formation constraint, and containment constraint approximately. As a result, satellite formation-containment control emphasis on collision avoidance and uncertainty suppression is achieved.