Distributed Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft Built on OA

Breger, Louis; Ferguson, Philip; How, Jonathan P.; Thomas, Stephanie; McLoughlin, Terence H.; Campbell, Mark

doi:10.2514/6.2003-5366

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The application of LP methods to the problem of relative orbit control has been presented in various forms in recent years. [11][12][13][14] In general, the LP approach is used to compute an impulsive delta-v sequence over a fixed time window, such that the desired relative state is achieved at the final time. Any time window may be chosen, providing greater flexibility than the analytic method.…”

Section: B Linear Programming Methods For Circular Orbitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Multiple-Team Organization for Decentralized Guidance and Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft

Mueller

2004

AIAA 1st Intelligent Systems Technical Conference

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In recent years, formation flying has become an enabling technology for several mission concepts at both NASA and the Department of Defense. In most cases, a multiple-satellite approach is required in order to accomplish the large-scale geometries imposed by the sensing objectives. In general, the paradigm shift of using a multiple-satellite cluster rather than a large, monolithic spacecraft has also been fueled by the objectives of increased robustness, greater flexibility, and reduced cost. However, the operational costs of monitoring and commanding a large fleet of close-orbiting satellites is likely to be unreasonable unless the onboard software is sufficiently autonomous, robust, and reconfigurable.This paper presents the prototype of a system that addresses these objectives -a decentralized guidance and control system that is distributed across spacecraft using a multipleteam framework. The system is designed to provide a high-level of autonomy, to support clusters with large numbers of satellites, to enable the number of spacecraft in the cluster to change post-launch, and to provide for on-orbit software modification. The real-time distributed system will be implemented in C++ using the MANTA environment (Messaging Architecture for Networking and Threaded Applications). In this architecture, tasks may be remotely added, removed or replaced post-launch to increase mission flexibility and robustness. This built-in adaptability will allow significant or simple software modifications to be made on-orbit in a robust manner. The prototype system, which is implemented in Matlab, emulates the task-based and message-passing features of the MANTA software.In this paper, the multiple-team organization of the cluster is described, and the relative dynamics in circular and eccentric reference orbits is reviewed. Families of periodic, relative trajectories are identified and represented with static geometric parameters. An analytic solution for impulsive maneuvering is used for whole orbit-period control in circular orbits, and linear programming techniques are used to find time-weighted, minimum-fuel control solutions. Finally, the decentralized guidance law design is presented, with a comparison between the optimal and a sub-optimal assignment algorithm.

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Section: B Linear Programming Methods For Circular Orbitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Multiple-Team Organization for Decentralized Guidance and Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft

Mueller

2004

AIAA 1st Intelligent Systems Technical Conference

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“…The dynamics of the perturbed part can be approximated to be linear and written in a state-space formulation, with time-varying state-space matrices , in the following way (6) thus making the LTP model that can be used for linear controller design.…”

Section: B Linear Time-periodic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, only a few results consider control design in discrete time, which is of great importance for real-life implementation on digital controllers (e.g., [25]). In order to enable truly autonomous and flexible operation of formations, distributed or decentralized control solutions to satellite formation flight should be considered, as has been indicated in recent works on this topic [6], [8], [9], [20], [31]. This paper focuses on the application of a new method for the synthesis of distributed controllers for the efficient station-keeping of satellite or spacecraft formations.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Decomposition-Based Approach to Linear Time-Periodic Distributed Control of Satellite Formations

Massioni

Keviczky

Gill

et al. 2011

IEEE Trans. Contr. Syst. Technol.

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Abstract-In this paper, we consider the problem of designing a distributed controller for a formation of spacecraft following a periodic orbit. Each satellite is controlled locally on the basis of information from only a subset of the others (the nearest ones). We describe the dynamics of each spacecraft by means of a linear time-periodic (LTP) approximation, and we cast the satellite formation into a state-space formulation that facilitates control synthesis. Our technique exploits a novel modal decomposition of the state-space model and uses linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) for suboptimal control design of distributed controllers with guaranteed performance for formations of any size. The application of the method is shown in two case studies. The first example is inspired by a mission in a low, sun-synchronous Earth orbit, namely the new Dutch-Chinese Formation for Atmospheric Science and Technology demonstration mission (FAST), which is now in the preliminary design phase. The second example deals with a formation of spacecraft in a halo orbit.

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“…The application of model-predictive control techniques to the problem of relative orbit control has been presented in various forms in recent years. [14][15][16][17] In general, a linear program is used to compute an impulsive ΔV sequence over a fixed time window, such that the initial state is brought to the desired state at the final time.…”

Section: Control Law Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentralized Formation Flying Control in a Multiple‐Team Hierarchy

Mueller

Thomas

2005

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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In recent years, formation flying has been recognized as an enabling technology for a variety of mission concepts in both the scientific and defense arenas. Examples of developing missions at NASA include magnetospheric multiscale (MMS), solar imaging radio array (SIRA), and terrestrial planet finder (TPF). For each of these missions, a multiple satellite approach is required in order to accomplish the large-scale geometries imposed by the science objectives. In addition, the paradigm shift of using a multiple satellite cluster rather than a large, monolithic spacecraft has also been motivated by the expected benefits of increased robustness, greater flexibility, and reduced cost. However, the operational costs of monitoring and commanding a fleet of close-orbiting satellites is likely to be unreasonable unless the onboard software is sufficiently autonomous, robust, and scalable to large clusters. This paper presents the prototype of a system that addresses these objectives-a decentralized guidance and control system that is distributed across spacecraft using a multiple team framework. The objective is to divide large clusters into teams of "manageable" size, so that the communication and computation demands driven by N decentralized units are related to the number of satellites in a team rather than the entire cluster. The system is designed to provide a high level of autonomy, to support clusters with large numbers of satellites, to enable the number of spacecraft in the cluster to change post-launch, and to provide for on-orbit software modification. The distributed guidance and control system will be implemented in an object-oriented style using a messaging architecture for networking and threaded applications (MANTA). In this architecture, tasks may be remotely added, removed, or replaced post launch to increase mission flexibility and robustness. This built-in adaptability will allow software modifications to be made on-orbit in a robust manner. The prototype system, which is implemented in Matlab, emulates the object-oriented and message-passing features of the MANTA software. In this paper, the multiple team organization of the cluster is described, and the modular software architecture is presented. The relative dynamics in eccentric reference orbits is reviewed, and families of periodic, relative trajectories are identified, expressed as sets of static geometric parameters. The guidance law design is presented, and an example reconfiguration scenario is used to illustrate the distributed process of assigning geometric goals to the cluster. Next, a decentralized maneuver planning approach is presented that utilizes linear-programming methods to enact reconfiguration and coarse formation keeping maneuvers. Finally, a method for performing online collision avoidance is discussed, and an example is provided to gauge its performance.

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Distributed Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft Built on OA

Cited by 12 publications

References 8 publications

A Multiple-Team Organization for Decentralized Guidance and Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft

A Multiple-Team Organization for Decentralized Guidance and Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft

A Decomposition-Based Approach to Linear Time-Periodic Distributed Control of Satellite Formations

Decentralized Formation Flying Control in a Multiple‐Team Hierarchy

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