Construction of Synergistic Potential Functions on SO(3) with Application to Velocity-Free Hybrid Attitude Stabilization

Abstract: We propose a systematic and comprehensive procedure for the construction of synergistic potential functions, which are instrumental in hybrid control design on SO(3). A new map via angular warping on SO(3) is introduced for the construction of such a family of potential functions allowing an explicit determination of the critical points and the synergistic gap. Some optimization results on the synergistic gap are also provided. The proposed synergistic potential functions are used for the design of a global velocity-free hybrid attitude stabilization scheme relying solely on inertial vector measurements. Comparative simulation results between the proposed global hybrid control scheme and the almost global smooth control scheme have been carried out.