Adaptive prescribed performance control for spacecraft attitude synchronization subject to external disturbances with guaranteed steady‐state performance

Abstract This paper proposes an adaptive prescribed performance control approach for multiple spacecraft attitude synchronization with the undirected topology. A novel distributed observer is proposed to estimate the states of the leader spacecraft while the estimation value of attitude is still a unit quaternion. Then we design the adaptive prescribed performance control algorithm restrain the external disturbances and parameter uncertainty. By the unit quaternion estimation value of attitude, we make the extension from single spacecraft to multiple spacecraft. Compared to some previous results, the bounds of attitude tracking error and angular velocity error in the steady state can be adjusted by users.