PDE-based distributed adaptive fault-tolerant attitude consensus of multiple flexible spacecraft

In this article, a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is presented for the attitude consensus of multiple flexible spacecraft formulated by partial differential equations (PDEs). Each spacecraft is supposed to be actuated by a control torque on the rigid hub and a control force on the tip payload. First, a finitetime distributed observer is constructed to estimate the virtual leader's state for each follower spacecraft under local communication. Then, an individual controller is exploited for each follower spacecraft, which consists of an adaptive boundary control torque law to track the recovered attitude and velocity and an adaptive boundary control force law to eliminate the elastic deformation. Particularly, the parametric adaptation laws are incorporated to compensate the actuator faults and perturbations. The attitude synchronization errors, velocity synchronization errors, and elastic deformations can asymptotically stabilize to zero under the introduced controller. This work owns the following two major novelties. One is introducing a unified distributed control framework for the PDE-based attitude consensus of multiple flexible spacecraft. Another is developing a novel parametric adaptation strategy to accommodate the actuator faults. Lastly, comparative simulations verify and highlight the main results.