Attitude Consensus of Switched Networked Spacecraft Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper, we study the leader-following attitude consensus problem for a group of spacecraft systems under the time-varying network topology. To be precise, the time-varying network topology is allowed to be jointly connected switching. In comparison with the existing literature on the similar problem, the requirement on the network topology is greatly relaxed. As a consequence, it causes great technical challenges to the solution of the problem. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel distributed control law based on a class of nonlinear distributed observers subject to time-varying network communication. By introducing some technical lemmas, we show that the leader-following attitude consensus problem for a group of spacecraft systems under the jointly connected switching network can be solved.