Coordinated Motion Control of Distributed Spacecraft with Relative State Estimation
Xiaochu Wang, Kaichun Zhao, Zheng You · Journal of Aerospace Engineering · 2015
This paper addresses the coordination problem of distributed spacecraft systems with time-invariant communication topologies. In order to estimate the neighbor spacecraft’ relative states which are not able to be measured directly, estimating processes are established on each spacecraft by utilizing an unscented Kalman filtering approach with measuring principles of both the pseudorange and the carrier phase. Based on such estimations, a distributed consensus protocol is proposed to address the coordinated motion problem of distributed spacecraft. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through numerical simulations, with a low-Earth-orbit satellites flying scenario.