Attitude synchronization of rigid bodies via distributed control

In this paper, we focus on one of the motion coordination problems called attitude synchronization. We propose a continuous-time protocol to align the states of a network of agents evolving in the space of rotations SO(3). Our work is related to the Riemannian consensus, which is a general extension of classical consensus algorithms to Riemannian manifolds. The existing algorithms have the problem of either lack of global convergence or slow convergence rate. We show how to modify them so that the states of the agents can be aligned from almost any initial condition and also in faster convergence speed.