Abstract: The coordination control problem for formation flying satellites associated with time-varying reference attitude tracking was investigated, and a nonlinear, saturated, and decentralized coordination controller was proposed. By introducing a hyperbolic tangent function vector in the controller, the boundness of the continuous control input was guaranteed. Barbalat′s lemma was employed to analyze the stability of the closed-loop attitude coordination controlled system, then the result of the asymptotical stability was obtained. Simulations under various conditions validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and establish the relation between the relative-attitude-keeping performance during the transition and the factors, which are the topology of the information communication graph of formation satellites and controller gains.

Key words: Lyapunov stability, Input constraints, Attitude synergetic control, Formation flight, Satellite