富兰克林审稿意见

Ms. Ref. No.: FI-D-14-00967

Title: Distributed Finite-time Attitude Containment Control of Multi-rigid-body Systems

Journal of the Franklin Institute

Dear Dr. Long Ma,

Reviewers have now commented on your paper and, based on the recommendation of the Associate Editor handling your paper, I would advise you to revise your manuscript. If you are prepared to undertake the work required, I would be pleased to reconsider my decision.

For your guidance, reviewers' comments are appended below. Please use these comments to revise and resubmit within 120 days from the date of this letter. Please be aware if we do not receive your revision within 120 days we will consider your paper rejected.

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Yours sincerely,

Michael V. Basin, Dr. Senior Editor

Journal of the Franklin Institute

Reviewer/Editor comments:

Associate Editor: Three individual reviews have been collected. Two reviewers think the paper contains interesting materials and the paper could be accepted after a minor revision. However, one reviewer points out that there are no clear advantages compared with [16]. According to the reviewers' comments, I suggest the authors make a thorough revision, especially show the advantage of the results and methods in comparison with [16].

Reviewer #1: The paper investigates the distributed finite-time attitude containment control problem for multi-rigid-body systems with stationary and dynamic leaders under directed graphs. In my opinion, the topic of the paper is interesting. The paper is acceptable for publication provided that the following comments are considered for revision.

(1)There are several typing and grammar errors. The authors should check the paper carefully and correct all possible errors.

(2)The authors may add some comments on the comparison with the existing containment protocols of multi-rigid-body systems.

(3)Please give the direction of your future work in the section of Conclusion.

Reviewer #2: This paper concerns distributed finite-time attitude containment control problem for multiple rigid bodies. Both the

regulation and tracking cases are considered and finite-time estimator and controllers are designed. Overall, this paper is clearly presented and some of the ideas are new as far as I know. I think the paper is acceptable after the following comments are considered.

Define finite-time stability or finite-time cooperative regulation and cooperative tracking in a proper way. Also, specify the results are local or global.

The convergences of the proposed algorithms are more than the definition of (6) and (7). You can actually know where the states converge to in the convex hull specifically.

I believe Lemma 4 is first proven in [16].

The assumption that the leaders' attitudes and the first-order and second-order derivatives are all bounded needs to be written as a formal assumption.

The notation of \\rho^(1) needs to be clarify after (11).

In Remark 3, the authors mention that [16] is not preferable because it is transformed into a linear-like dynamics. However, in fact, the

nonlinear terms introduced in (25) and (13) have the similar effects. In such a compensation way, the closed-loop system of the current paper is also reduced a linear-like dynamics, which can be also seen from the proofs of Theorems 1 and 2. I don't see the essential difference here, and therefore recommend not mentioning Remark 3.

Are you sure there is separation principle proposed in [28]?

What is p_i in (25)?

Reviewer #3: This paper proposes a distributed finite-time attitude containment control method of multi-rigid-body systems.

This paper is based on [16], but the nonlinear dynamics on attitude is used for a distributed controller design instead of the transformation to Lagrange expression. The property (5) is employed to design a controller without the transformation.

However, there are no clear advantages compared with [16]. That is, using a controller without the transformation does not have any merits in the side of performance, design simplicity, and so on.

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