Leader-Following Consensus of Multiple Rigid Body Systems by Bounded Attitude Feedback

In this article, we study the leader-following attitude consensus problem of multiple rigid body systems by bounded distributed attitude feedback control. The desired reference attitude and the desired reference angular velocity are assumed to be generated by a leader system. To estimate the reference attitude and the reference angular velocity, we establish a nonlinear distributed observer for the leader system that generates a priori bounded estimates of the system matrix, the output matrix, and the state variables of the leader system. We further synthesize a bounded distributed attitude feedback control law to solve the leader-following consensus problem over a jointly connected switching network based on the distributed observer. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.