Commanding and Controlling Satellite Clusters (IEEE Intelligent Systems, November/December 2000)

摘要

Many organizations, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Department of Defense, want to use constellations or fleets of autonomous spacecraft working together to accomplish complex mission objectives. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate is now developing architectures for commanding and controlling a cluster of cooperating satellites through autonomous software development for the TechSat 21 program. Many space missions require large, monolithic satellites. This often results in costly, complex, failure-prone vehicles whose physical size constraints limit their performance characteristics. Recently, various organizations have begun to explore how distributed clusters of cooperating satellites can replace their larger monolithic counterparts to reduce overall costs, enhance mission performance, and increase system fault tolerance. Large clusters of satellites flying in formation must have some level of onboard autonomy to fly within specified tolerance levels; avoid collisions; address fault detection, isolation, and resolution (FDIR); share knowledge; and plan and schedule activities. Commanding and controlling a large cluster of satellites can be very burdensome for ground operators as well. This article describes the authors' efforts to address these issues through the technology development for TechSat 21 program.