Almost Sure Attitude Consensus in Multispacecraft Systems With Stochastic Communication Links

Leaderless attitude consensus problem over multispacecraft systems is studied. The base of convergence analysis of existing results devoted to attitude consensus control of multispacecraft systems is deterministic knowledge on networks communication links. The main contribution of the present study is to design a control strategy guaranteeing almost sure attitude consensus in a multispacecraft system when communication links stochastically fail over time. Moreover, it is assumed that there exist constraints on the spacecraft input torques. To achieve the mentioned objectives, we propose a magnitude-constrained consensus control law for the spacecraft; then, by invoking the generalized invariance principle and the super-martingales convergence theorem, almost sure convergence of quaternion-based consensus errors to zero is concluded. The results are verified via a simulation example.