Development of a Generic Guidance Navigation Control System for Small Satellites: Application to Husky Sat-1

摘要

This paper presents the development of a generic Guidance, Navigation & Control (GNC) system for small satellites at the University of Washington that serves as a testbed for algorithm development and supports small satellite mission design. Our ultimate aim is to advance the capabilities of autonomous satellite operations by demonstrating advanced on-board control and estimation techniques, though the work is equally applicable to earth-imaging, pointing and technology demonstration missions. The work discusses the development of flight software and requisite sensor, actuator and environmental models needed to validate flight software functionality. The first mission application is the HuskySat-1 mission, undertaken by a student-led group at the University of Washington. Primarily a technology demonstration, HuskySat-1 is a 3U CubeSat equipped with a pulsed plasma thruster and a high-frequency communication antenna, equipped with a 3-axis active attitude control subsystem. We demonstrate through software and hardware-based testing that our system supports both scientific payloads. We outline our approach to algorithm development, verification and validation, and briefly hardware-in-the-loop testing.