Analysis and Distributed Control of a Formation of Intelligent Satellites.

摘要

Perturbation based methods for determining initial conditions and shaping satellite formations to accommodate nonlinearity of the differential gravitational acceleration as well as eccentricity of the reference orbit have been developed. Control laws for formation maintenance as well as reconfiguration, valid for large formations and eccentric reference orbits have been developed via filter based LQR designs and period matching. An analytical solution to the relative motion problem has been obtained by using a unit-sphere description of the motion. This approach converts the problem of formation control into an attitude control problem. A sub-optimal strategy for reconfiguring a formation using impulsive thrust has been developed that does not require any off-line optimization. The results of this approach have been compared with those obtained from numerical optimization. An analytical technique has also been developed for designing formations for large and high eccentricity relative orbits.