Experimental Testing and Validation of Cyber-Physical Coregulation of a CubeSat

摘要

CubeSat systems use much of their onboard computing and electrical power for the critical missions of guidance, navigation, and control. As a result, judicious allocation of computing, communication, and control can yield improved mission and system performance. Typical control strategies utilize controllers executed at fixed periodic rates even during more inactive periods of the mission, relegating the scientific mission of the CubeSat to a secondary role given limited computing resources. We view the CubeSat as a Cyber-Physical System and work toward the holistic design of computational and physical sources. We have developed a novel coregulation scheme in which the sampling rate of the controller is adjusted according to physical system performance, and the physical control inputs are adjusted according to the new sampling rate; the result is a discrete-time varying coregulation strategy. In this work, we demonstrate our technique on a desktop CubeSat hardware emulator and look towards its implementation on the first CubeSat from the state of Nebraska.