Application of Synchronization to Formation Flying Spacecraft: Lagrangian Approach

By Soon-Jo Chung, Umair Ahsun, Jean-Jacques E. Slotine. 2008

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article presents a unified synchronization framework with application to precision formation flying spacecraft. Central to the proposed innovation, in applying synchronization to both translational and rotational dynamics in the Lagrangian form, is the use of the distributed stability and performance analysis tool, called contraction analysis that yields exact nonlinear stability proofs. The proposed decentralized tracking control law synchronizes the attitude of an arbitrary number of spacecraft into a common time-varying trajectory with global exponential convergence. Moreover, a decentralized translational tracking control law based on phase synchronization is presented, thus enabling coupled translational and rotational maneuvers. While the translational dynamics can be adequately controlled by linear control laws, the proposed method permits highly nonlinear systems with nonlinearly coupled inertia matrices such as the attitude dynamics of spacecraft whose large and rapid slew maneuvers justify the nonlinear control approach. The proposed method integrates both the trajectory tracking and synchronization problems in a single control framework.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications, Control and Systems Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e5e507879088dd5fb074235343dbae5c00a051a

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Computer Networks and Communications

In Control and Systems Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Aerial Swarm Robotics (2018, background): “synchronization of mixing multiple virtual leaders with many synchronized groups to create a complex time-varying swarm comprised of numerous heterogeneous systems [27], [28], [30], [38].”
Cooperative Robot Control and Concurrent Synchronization of Lagrangian Systems (2007, unknown): “, see [9], [34]).”
Adaptive group consensus in uncertain networked Euler–Lagrange systems under directed topology (2015, background): “In general, coordination problems encountered in engineering applications can often be rephrased as the controlled synchronization or consensus problems of multi-agent systems, which aim to enhance both the robustness and performance of networked control systems [1–7].”
Distributed finite-time attitude containment control for multiple rigid bodies (2010, unknown): “Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Automatica journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/automatica Brief paper Distributed finite-time attitude containment control for multiple rigid bodies✩ Ziyang Meng a,b, Wei Ren b,∗, Zheng You a a Department of Precision Instruments & Mechanology, Tsinghu”
Decentralised static output feedback stabilisation and synchronisation of networks (2009, background): “More recently, in [31], decentralised tracking control laws have been developed for formation flying based on contraction analysis principles posed as a synchronization problem.”