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A Closed-Loop Hardware Simulation of Decentralized Satellite Formation ControlIn recent years, there has been significant interest in the use of formation flying spacecraft for a variety of earth and space science missions. Formation flying may provide smaller and cheaper satellites that, working together, have more capability than larger and more expensive satellites. Several decentralized architectures have been proposed for autonomous establishment and maintenance of satellite formations. In such architectures, each satellite cooperatively maintains the shape of the formation without a central supervisor, and processing only local measurement information. The Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors are ideally suited to provide such local position and velocity measurements to the individual satellites. An investigation of the feasibility of a decentralized approach to satellite formation flying was originally presented by Carpenter. He extended a decentralized linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) framework proposed by Speyer in a fashion similar to an extended Kalman filter (EKE) which processed GPS position fix solutions. The new decentralized LQG architecture was demonstrated in a numerical simulation for a realistic scenario that is similar to missions that have been proposed by NASA and the U.S. Air Force. Another decentralized architecture was proposed by Park et al. using carrier differential-phase GPS (CDGPS). Recently, Busse et al demonstrated the decentralized CDGPS architecture in a hardware-in-the-loop simulation on the Formation Flying TestBed (FFTB) at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), which features two Spirent Cox 16 channel GPS signal generator. Although representing a step forward by utilizing GPS signal simulators for a spacecraft formation flying simulation, only an open-loop performance, in which no maneuvers were executed based on the real-time state estimates, was considered. In this research, hardware experimentation has been extended to include closed-loop integrated guidance and navigation of multiple spacecraft formations using GPS receivers and real-time vehicle telemetry. A hardware closed-loop simulation has been performed using the decentralized LQG architecture proposed by Carpenter in the GPS test facility at the Center for Space Research (CSR). This is the first presentation using this type of hardware for demonstration of closed-loop spacecraft formation flying.
Document ID
20020082933
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Ebimuma, Takuji
(Texas Univ. Austin, TX United States)
Lightsey, E. Glenn
(Texas Univ. Austin, TX United States)
Baur, Frank
Date Acquired
August 20, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2002
Subject Category
Spacecraft Design, Testing And Performance
Meeting Information
Meeting: American Astronautical Society Guidance and Control Conference
Location: Breckenridge, CO
Country: United States
Start Date: February 1, 2003
End Date: February 28, 2003
Sponsors: American Astronautical Society
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NAG5-11287
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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