A Swarm Flocking Control Method of Spacecraft Cluster Flight

Most conventional cooperative control methods are based on the top–down mechanisms. These mechanisms are usually centralized. In order to improve the viability of spacecraft cluster, a novel distributed flocking control combining the exponential function and the piecewise function is proposed to organize and guide spacecraft monomers to achieve the coordinated flocking behavior and the stable orbit operation. In addition, the spacecrafts can achieve the stable space to avoid collision. As the relative motion dynamics model of spacecraft is considered in the design of the flocking local rules, the proposed flocking model is practical in theory. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out, which verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed flocking model.