Finite-Time Synchronization Control of Spacecraft Formation With Network-Induced Communication Delay

This paper addresses the distributed orbit synchronization control of spacecraft formation flying under an undirected connected graph and in the presence of unknown external disturbances and communication time-delay. A nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode (NFTSM) control strategy, which can solve the singularity and slow convergence to the equilibrium problems of terminal sliding mode (TSM) control, is developed for spacecraft formation. Considering only desired signals are needed for the basis functions of Chebyshev neural networks (CNN) implemented, a CNN is employed to approximate the nonlinear function and bounded external disturbances. Based on the NFTSM and CNN approximation, a distributed finite-time synchronization control law is designed and its finite-time convergence property is proven in theory. Moreover, in order to guarantee good performance for the spacecraft formation control with communication delay, a distributed finite-time synchronization control scheme with communication delay is also given and the uniform ultimate boundedness of all signals in the closed-loop control system is proven. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies.