Edge-Triggered Leader–Follower Consensus of Multiple Spacecraft Systems With Unknown Disturbances

Multiple rigid bodies can model various practical industrial systems. However, periodic sampled-data communication can have a load over the network subject to limited bandwidth. The research on the leader-follower attitude consensus issue for a group of rigid-body dynamics is conducted in this technical paper. The plant of each follower is subject to unknown external disturbances. To reduce the burden of the communication network, an edge-triggered nonlinear distributed observer with dynamic triggering mechanisms is presented. The proposed observer has the ability to evaluate the leader system's state regardless of implementing the continuous-time exchange of the neighborhood information. The proposed edge-based triggering mechanism is asynchronous while eliminating the Zeno phenomenon. Based on the nonlinear observer, a distributed control protocol together with an adaptive law is put forward in order to realize the leader-follower attitude consensus while attenuating the unknown external disturbances. In the end, an illustrative example of a collection of spacecraft systems is provided to verify the feasibility of our methods.