Synchronized multiple spacecraft rotations

The objective of this paper is to present fort-nation control laws for maintaining attitude alignment among a group of spacecraft in either deep space or earth orbit. The paper presents two control strategies based on emergent behavior approaches. Each control strategy considers the desired formation behaviors of convergence to the final formation goal, formation keeping, and the desire to rotate the spacecraft about fixed axes. The first approach uses velocity feedback and the second approach used passivity-based damping. In addition, we prove analytically that our approach guarantees formation keeping throughout the maneuver. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.