• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.7
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• pp.1014-1018
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• 2012

This paper presents a decentralized controller design for formation flying of multiple satellites based on the overlapping decomposition technique. Each satellite is assumed to avail only the information of its own and in front of itself, which restricts the structure of a controller gain matrix to an overlapped form. The concerned large-scale system is expanded using the overlapping decomposition technique. Design condition is represented in terms of linear matrix inequalities with small-scale systems in a decentralized form, based on the expanded system. The resulting controller is contracted to the original overlapped form so as to close the original system. A numerical simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

• Bulletin of the Korean Space Science Society
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.42-42
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• 2003

Satellite formation flying is the placing of multiple satellites into nearby orbits to form 'clusters' of satellites. These clusters of satellites usually work together to accomplish a mission. There are many benefits to using multiple satellite as opposed to one large satellites such as increasing productivity. reducing mission and launch cost. Hill's equations are useful to describe the relative motion of two satellites in formation flying, however. the disturbance forces acting on satellites is not considered in that equations. In this paper, a method for maintaining the relative distance between satellites is presented, which used mean orbital elements considering J2 perturbation. Control design process is also presented for minimizing total fuel consumption.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.361-374
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• 2008

Recently, satellite formation flying has been a topic of significant research interest in aerospace society because it provides potential benefits compared to a large spacecraft. Some techniques have been proposed to design optimal formation trajectories minimizing fuel consumption in the process of formation configuration or reconfiguration. In this study, a method is introduced to build fuel-optimal trajectories minimizing a cost function that combines the total fuel consumption of all satellites and assignment of fuel consumption rate for each satellite. This approach is based on collocation and nonlinear programming to solve constraints for collision avoidance and the final configuration. New constraints of nonlinear equality or inequality are derived for final configuration, and nonlinear inequality constraints are established for collision avoidance. The final configuration constraints are that three or more satellites should form a projected circular orbit and make an equilateral polygon in the horizontal plane. Example scenarios, including these constraints and the cost function, are simulated by the method to generate optimal trajectories for the formation configuration and reconfiguration of multiple satellites.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.351-359
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• 2010

This paper proposes a linear system control algorithm with collision avoidance in multiple satellites. Consideration of collision avoidance is augmented by adding a weighting term in the cost function of the original tracking problem in linear quadratic control (LQC). Because the proposed algorithm relies on a similar solution procedure to the original LQC, its inherent advantages, including gain-robustness and optimality, are preserved. To confirm and visualize the derived algorithm, a simple example of two-vehicle motion in the two-dimensional plane is illustrated. In addition, the proposed collision avoidance control is applied to satellite formation flying, and verified by numerical simulations.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.129-139
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• 2007

In this paper, attitude control laws for simultaneous pointing of multiple spacecrafts are considered under a formation flying scenario. The basic approach lies in adaptive feedback gains using relative attitude information or maneuver time approximation for coordinated attitude control. Each control law is targeted to balancing mean motion or to correcting system response to the slowest satellite. The control gain adaptation is constructed by two approaches. The first one is using variable damping gain to manipulate speed of a fast system response, and the second one uses alternate natural frequency of the system under control. The validity and stability of the proposed approaches are examined analytically and tested through numerical simulations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.33 no.10
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• pp.51-59
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• 2005

In this paper, results of a multiple spacecraft formation-keeping control using the orbital relative motion and optimization technique are presented. To analyze and predict the relative motion between the formation-flying satellites, a closed-form orbit propagator obtained using the method of ephemeris compression is used. This closed-form orbit propagator is combined with optimization technique to plan a series of impulsive maneuvers, which maintain the formation configuration within the specified limit. As an example, this method is applied to the problem of maintaining the projected circular formation geometry and results from nonlinear simulation are presented.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.393-398
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• 2008

This paper suggests a GPS/INS navigation computer architecture that can be applied to small satellites. In order to implement a GPS/INS navigation system on a small satellite, the extreme environment in space such as radiation, micro-gravity, vacuum, etc. must be considered. In addition, a real-time processing ability is required for the GPS/INS navigation system since the formation flying of multiple small satellites is the ultimate goal. The developed navigation electronics utilizes a PowerPC-type MPC860T that has space environment heritage, and a pair of Atmega128s that has been implemented in KAUSAT-2 and has completed the space environment verification tests. The navigation algorithm is designed to work in VxWorks environment, ported in MPC860T.