• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.361-374
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• 2008

Recently, satellite formation flying has been a topic of significant research interest in aerospace society because it provides potential benefits compared to a large spacecraft. Some techniques have been proposed to design optimal formation trajectories minimizing fuel consumption in the process of formation configuration or reconfiguration. In this study, a method is introduced to build fuel-optimal trajectories minimizing a cost function that combines the total fuel consumption of all satellites and assignment of fuel consumption rate for each satellite. This approach is based on collocation and nonlinear programming to solve constraints for collision avoidance and the final configuration. New constraints of nonlinear equality or inequality are derived for final configuration, and nonlinear inequality constraints are established for collision avoidance. The final configuration constraints are that three or more satellites should form a projected circular orbit and make an equilateral polygon in the horizontal plane. Example scenarios, including these constraints and the cost function, are simulated by the method to generate optimal trajectories for the formation configuration and reconfiguration of multiple satellites.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.177-184
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• 2006

An orbital design method of the formation initialization based on the relative orbital element method is presented. It firstly constructed the relative motion equation of the satellite formation flying in terms of the leader and followers' orbital elements. Then the equation was simplified when the orbit eccentricity of the leader satellite was small. And according to the satellites' mission, a general design method for the relative trajectory was proposed. The advantage of this method is that one can get a very simple analytical formula of each follower satellite's orbital elements when the orbital eccentricity of the leader satellite is zero. The simulation results show that the method is effective.

• Bulletin of the Korean Space Science Society
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.41-41
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• 2003

Satellite formation flying is currently an active area of research in the aerospace engineering. There are many categories for this research such as the determination of initial conditions, formation keeping, configuration and reconfiguration. In this study, a tracking controller using sliding mode techniques is designed to control a satellite for the satellite formation flying. In general, Hill's equations are used to describe the relative motion of the follower satellite with respect to the leader satellite. But, the modified Hill's equations considering J2 perturbation were used for the design of sliding mode controller. Sliding mode control law causes the chattering phenomenon because it is a discontinuous control. Dead-zone was used to avoid the chattering. The Extended Kalman filter was applied to estimate the state vector based on the measurements of relative distance and velocity between two satellites.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.163-173
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• 2018

This paper presents relative navigation using intermittent laser-based measurement data for spacecraft flying formation that consist of two spacecrafts; namely, chief and deputy spacecrafts. The measurement data consists of the relative distance measured by a femtosecond laser, and the relative angles between the two spacecrafts. The filtering algorithms used for the relative navigation are the extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and least squares recursive filter (LSRF). Numerical simulations reveal that the relative navigation performances of the EKF- and UKF-based relative navigation algorithms decrease in accuracy as the measurement outage period increases. However, the relative navigation performance of the UKF-based algorithm is 95 % more accurate than that of the EKF-based algorithm when the measurement outage period is 80 sec. Although the relative navigation performance of the LSRF-based relative navigation algorithm is 94 % and 370 % less accurate than those of the EKF- and UKF-based navigation algorithms, respectively, when the measurement outage period is 5 sec; the navigation error varies within a range of 4 %, even though the measurement outage period is increased. The results of this study can be applied to the design of a relative navigation strategy using the developed algorithms with laser-based measurements for spacecraft formation flying.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.317-328
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• 2009

Relative dynamic models of satellites which describe the relative motion between two satellites is fundamental for research on the formation flying. The accuracy of various linearized or nonlinear models of relative motion is analyzed and compared. A 'Modeling Error Index (MEI)' is defined for evaluating the accuracy of models. The accuracy of the relative dynamic models in various orbit circumstance are obtained by calculating the modeling error with various eccentricities of the chief orbit and distances between the chief and the deputy. It is found that the modeling errors of the relative dynamic models have different values according to the eccentricity, J2 perturbation, and the distance between satellites. Since the evaluated accuracy of various models in this paper means the error of dynamic models of the formation flying, the results of this paper are very useful for choosing the appropriate relative model of the formation flying mission.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.183-192
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• 2013

This paper presents formation reconfiguration using impulsive control input for spacecraft formation flying. Spacecraft in a formation should change the formation size and/or geometry according to the mission requirements and space environment. To modify the formation radius and geometry with respect to the leader spacecraft, the follower spacecraft generates additional control inputs; the two impulsive control inputs are general control type of the spacecraft system. For the impulsive control input, Lambert's problem is modified to construct the transfer orbit in relative motion, given two position vectors at the initial and final time. Moreover, the numerical simulation results show the transfer trajectories to resize the formation radius in the radial/along-track plane formation and in the along-track/cross-track plane formation. In addition, the maneuver characteristics are described by comparing the differential orbital elements between the reference orbit and transfer orbit in the radial/along-track plane formation and along-track/cross-track plane formation.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2013

An integrated orbit and attitude control algorithm for satellite formation flying was developed, and an integrated orbit and attitude software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulator was also developed to test and verify the integrated control algorithm. The integrated algorithm includes state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) control algorithm and PD feedback control algorithm as orbit and attitude controller respectively and configures the two algorithms with an integrating effect. The integrated SIL simulator largely comprises an orbit SIL simulator for orbit determination and control, and attitude SIL simulator for attitude determination and control. The two SIL simulators were designed considering the performance and characteristics of related hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulators and were combined into the integrated SIL simulator. To verify the developed integrated SIL simulator with the integrated control algorithm, an orbit simulation and integrated orbit and attitude simulation were performed for a formation reconfiguration scenario using the orbit SIL simulator and the integrated SIL simulator, respectively. Then, the two simulation results were compared and analyzed with each other. As a result, the user satellite in both simulations achieved successful formation reconfiguration, and the results of the integrated simulation were closer to those of actual satellite than the orbit simulation. The integrated orbit and attitude control algorithm verified in this study enables us to perform more realistic orbit control for satellite formation flying. In addition, the integrated orbit and attitude SIL simulator is able to provide the environment of easy test and verification not only for the existing diverse orbit or attitude control algorithms but also for integrated orbit and attitude control algorithms.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.255-266
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• 2008

The current paper presents application of a new analytic solution in general relative motion to spacecraft formation flying in an elliptic orbit. The calculus of variations is used to analytically find optimal trajectories and controls for the given problem. The inverse of the fundamental matrix associated with the dynamic equations is not required for the solution in the current study. It is verified that the optimal thrust vector is a function of the fundamental matrix of the given state equations. The cost function and the state vector during the reconfiguration can be analytically obtained as well. The results predict the form of optimal solutions in advance without having to solve the problem. Numerical simulation shows the brevity and the accuracy of the general analytic solutions developed in the current paper.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.351-359
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• 2010

This paper proposes a linear system control algorithm with collision avoidance in multiple satellites. Consideration of collision avoidance is augmented by adding a weighting term in the cost function of the original tracking problem in linear quadratic control (LQC). Because the proposed algorithm relies on a similar solution procedure to the original LQC, its inherent advantages, including gain-robustness and optimality, are preserved. To confirm and visualize the derived algorithm, a simple example of two-vehicle motion in the two-dimensional plane is illustrated. In addition, the proposed collision avoidance control is applied to satellite formation flying, and verified by numerical simulations.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.7
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• pp.1014-1018
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• 2012

This paper presents a decentralized controller design for formation flying of multiple satellites based on the overlapping decomposition technique. Each satellite is assumed to avail only the information of its own and in front of itself, which restricts the structure of a controller gain matrix to an overlapped form. The concerned large-scale system is expanded using the overlapping decomposition technique. Design condition is represented in terms of linear matrix inequalities with small-scale systems in a decentralized form, based on the expanded system. The resulting controller is contracted to the original overlapped form so as to close the original system. A numerical simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed technique.