Elementary attitude formation maneuvers via leader-following and behavior-based control

The objective of this paper is to present formation control laws for maintaining the relative attitude between a formation of free ying spacecraft in deep space. The paper presents two control strategies based on leader-following and emergent behavior approaches. The leader-following control has appeared elsewhere and is included for completeness. The main contribution of this paper is a new emergent behavior approach to the relative attitude control problem for spacecraft formations. In addition, we prove analytically that our approach guarantees formation keeping while maintaining relative alignment bounds throughout the maneuver. Simulation results compare leader-following with our approach.

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