Adaptive full-order sliding mode bounded attitude control for spacecraft formation flying with event-triggered communication

This paper provides an event-triggered finite-time adaptive bounded controller for attitude tracking of spacecraft formation flying under external disturbances and limited communication. To facilitate the realization of bounded control, a novel full-order terminal sliding mode surface is established according to the hyperbolic tangent function. To reduce the communication frequency among formation members, an event-triggered control strategy that can converge to zero in finite time is investigated based on the full-order sliding mode surface. Under the proposed control strategy, the spacecraft only send their information to neighboring spacecraft when the trigger error exceeds the defined threshold. Rigorous theoretical analysis provides that finite-time convergence and Zeno-free are achieved under the proposed controller. Finally, numerical simulations are exhibited to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.