Relative attitude formation control of multi-agent systems

This paper investigates the relative attitude formation control problem for a group of rigid-body agents using relative attitude information on SO(3). On the basis of the gradient of a potential function, a family of distributed angular velocity control laws, which differ in the sense of a geodesic distance dependent function, is proposed. With directed and switching interaction topologies, the desired relative attitude formation is showed to be achieved asymptotically provided that the topology is jointly quasi-strongly connected. Moreover, several sufficient conditions for the desired formation to be achieved exponentially and almost globally are given. Additionally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control laws. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.