Chapters authored
Consensus-Based Attitude Maneuver of Multi-spacecraft with Exclusion Constraints
Some space missions involve cooperative multi-vehicle teams, for such purposes as interferometry and optimal sensor coverage, for example, NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder Mission. Cooperative navigation introduces extra constraints of exclusion zones between the spacecraft to protect them from damaging each other. This is in addition to external exclusion constraints introduced by damaging or blinding celestial objects. This work presents a quaternion-based attitude consensus protocol, using the communication topology of the team of spacecraft. The resulting distributed Laplacians of their communication graph are applied by semidefinite programming (SDP), to synthesize a series of time-varying optimal stochastic matrices. The matrices are used to generate various cooperative attitude maneuvers from the initial attitudes of the spacecraft. Exclusion constraints are satisfied by quaternion-based quadratically constrained attitude control (Q-CAC), where both static and dynamic exclusion zones are identified every time step, expressed as time-varying linear matrix inequalities (LMI) and solved by semidefinite programming.
Part of the book: Space Flight