Nonsingular fixed-time attitude coordinated tracking control for multiple rigid spacecraft

This paper investigates the problem of fixed-time attitude coordinated control for multi-spacecraft systems with unknown external disturbance. Firstly, a distributed fixed-time observer is introduced to estimate the states of the virtual leader. The observer can track the leader completely in a fixed time without dependence on the initial conditions of the leader and observer. Then, we propose a novel nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode tracking controller to address the fixed-time attitude tracking problem. It is noteworthy that the requirement on initial conditions of spacecraft is removed in the proposed nonsingular sliding mode controller. Due to the robustness of sliding mode control, the influence of external disturbance can be eliminated, such that each spacecraft can track desired attitude trajectories precisely in a fixed time. Hence, the fixed-time attitude coordination for multiple spacecraft can be achieved. Finally, numerical simulation results and comparisons reveal the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.