  This paper presents global tracking strategies for the attitude dynamics of a
rigid body. It is well known that global attractivity is prohibited for
continuous attitude control systems on the special orthogonal group. Such
topological restriction has been dealt with either by constructing smooth
attitude control systems that exclude a set of measure zero in the region of
attraction, or by introducing hybrid control systems to obtain global
asymptotic stability. This paper proposes alternative attitude control systems
that are continuous in time to achieve exponential stability, where the region
of attraction covers the entire special orthogonal group. The main contribution
of this paper is providing a new framework to overcome the topological
restriction in attitude controls without relying on discontinuities through the
controlled maneuvers. The efficacy of the proposed methods is illustrated by
numerical simulations and experiments.
