Distributed Attitude Coordination Control for Spacecraft Formation Flying

A distributed attitude coordination control scheme using terminal sliding mode (TSM) is proposed for a group of spacecraft in the presence of external disturbances. A novel fast terminal sliding manifold is presented, and a robust control term based on the hyperbolic tangent function is employed to suppress bounded external disturbances. The finite-time stability of the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed by a Lyapunov-based approach, and numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller.