Review of attitude consensus of multiple spacecraft

Abstract

A group of cooperative agents can finish complicated missions that are difficult for a large machine. In the past two decades, spacecraft attitude coordination has attracted significant research attention owing to its wide potential applications. This paper presents a survey of recent research progress on the spacecraft attitude consensus problem, paying particular attention to the papers published in major aerospace, dynamics, automation, and robotics journals since 2015. Attitude consensus concepts for centralized, decentralized, and distributed cases are reviewed. This overview summarizes results on system dynamics and consensus algorithms based on frequently used attitude representations, such as Euler angles, modified Rodrigues parameters, unit quaternions, and rotation matrices. Studies conducted under complicated operating conditions are also covered. Experimental results on attitude consensus are discussed. In the final section, the main conclusions are drawn and several potential research directions are provided. [Figure not available: see fulltext.].