Robust attitude consensus control of multi-spacecraft with stochastic link failure

This paper presents an adaptive attitude consensus controller for a group of spacecrafts subject to stochastic communication link failure and external disturbances. By leveraging the sliding-mode control technique and the super-martingales convergence method, the proposed adaptive controller is robust to the bounded but unknown disturbances and ensures almost sure consensus on the attitude among multi-spacecraft, respectively. Moreover, when compared with the existing results dealing with attitude consensus control with indeterministic communication topology, our approach can drive the attitude of multi-spacecraft to a desired attitude of a virtual spacecraft. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an attitude consensus control of a group of six spacecraft with a virtual leader is carried out.