Cooperation Attitude Control as a Part of Spacecraft Formation Flying

Cooperative and coordination control for Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems (AMAS) are gaining more popularity and interest in many areas of aerospace engineering, such as air-traffic control, swarming satellites, launch/reentry-vehicle systems, and Formation Flying (FF). There are many advantages of cooperative control of autonomous FF of multiple small aerospace vehicles to replace a single large vehicle, such as increasing feasibility, reducing cost, probability of success, and significantly widening the operating area. For example, a group of cooperative Earth Observation radar satellites can enhance the overall resolution by observing backscattered signals from different angles compared to one giant costly satellite observing from one angle. Aerospace FF applications include distributed antennas, atmospheric sampling, and synthetic aperture radars. Besides, it is appealing to have robust and optimal control for space manufacturing and servicing. The Nano/microsatellites market is expected to grow as more companies develop smaller, cheaper launch vehicles. This paper demonstrates a model-based design for decentralized cooperation control as part of spacecraft formation flying using a single-integrator dynamic for deep space exploration missions

Comprehensive review on controller for leader-follower robotic system

985-1007This paper presents a comprehensive review of the leader-follower robotics system. The aim of this paper is to find and elaborate on the current trends in the swarm robotic system, leader-follower, and multi-agent system. Another part of this review will focus on finding the trend of controller utilized by previous researchers in the leader-follower system. The controller that is commonly applied by the researchers is mostly adaptive and non-linear controllers. The paper also explores the subject of study or system used during the research which normally employs multi-robot, multi-agent, space flying, reconfigurable system, multi-legs system or unmanned system. Another aspect of this paper concentrates on the topology employed by the researchers when they conducted simulation or experimental studies

State-of-the-art in Comprehensive Cascade Control Approach through Monte-Carlo Based Representation

The research relies on the comprehensive cascade control approach to be developed in the area of spacecraft, as long as Monte-Carlo based representation is taken into real consideration with respect to state-of-the-art. It is obvious that the conventional methods do not have sufficient merit to be able to deal with such a process under control, constantly, provided that a number of system parameters variations are to be used in providing real situations. It is to note that the new insights in the area of the research’s topic are valuable to outperform a class of spacecrafts performance as the realizations of the acquired results are to be addressed in both real and academic environments. In a word, there are a combination of double closed loop based upon quaternion based control approach in connection with Euler based control approach to handle the three-axis rotational angles and its rates, synchronously, in association with pulse modulation analysis and control allocation, where the dynamics and kinematics of the present system under control are analyzed. A series of experiments are carried out to consider the approach performance in which the aforementioned Monte-Carlo based representation is to be realized in verifying the investigated outcomes

Formation control of a group of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs)

Coordinated motion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been a growing research interest in the last decade. In this paper we propose a coordination model that makes use of virtual springs and dampers to generate reference trajectories for a group of quadrotors. Virtual forces exerted on each vehicle are produced by using projected distances between the quadrotors. Several coordinated task scenarios are presented and the performance of the proposed method is verified by simulations

On Development of 100-Gram-Class Spacecraft for Swarm Applications

A novel space system architecture is proposed, which would enable 100-g-class spacecraft to be flown as swarms (100 s-1000 s) in low Earth orbit. Swarms of Silicon Wafer Integrated Femtosatellites (SWIFT) present a paradigm-shifting approach to distributed spacecraft development, missions, and applications. Potential applications of SWIFT swarms include sparse aperture arrays and distributed sensor networks. New swarm array configurations are introduced and shown to achieve the effective sparse aperture driven from optical performance metrics. A system cost analysis based on this comparison justifies deploying a large number of femtosatellites for sparse aperture applications. Moreover, this paper discusses promising guidance, control, and navigation methods for swarms of femtosatellites equipped with modest sensing and control capabilities