Multi-task formation of multi-spacecraft via distributed hierarchical control

This paper considers the multi-task formation control problem of a group of spacecrafts. Control objectives include: collision avoidance, connectivity maintenance, and achieving the desired configuration. The main underlying idea is to develop a new distributed hierarchical control protocol, which provides a hierarchical structure for preserving the network connectivity, thus making it a less conservative way to achieve multi-task formation. A novel Lyapunov-like barrier function is constructed for encoding the objectives of hierarchical connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance. Then, a distributed gradient-based controller is proposed such that the multi-task formation can be achieved. A numerical example illustrates the effectiveness of proposed method.