Resilient Attitude Alignment in Multispacecraft Systems

Resilient attitude alignment of leaderless multispacecraft systems (MSSs) in the presence of cyberattacks is investigated. The main problem of resilient cooperative control schemes existing in the literature is their limitation to integrator linear systems. However, since real spacecraft are prone to uncertainties in model parameters, they may not be feedback linearizable to integrator models. Thus, the main contribution of the current study is to guarantee attitude alignment in MSSs in the presence of cyberattacks when the model parameters of the spacecraft are unknown. We propose a cooperative adaptive control scheme for a network of spacecraft, and based on the concept of robust graphs, we show that if the network connectivity is sufficiently robust with respect to the number of possible malicious spacecraft (spacecraft under cyberattacks), attitude alignment among the normal spacecraft can be guaranteed. The accuracy of the proposed control strategy is validated via a simulation example.