Resilient Spacecraft Formation Control Under Malfunctioning Communication
Sean A. Phillips, Christopher Petersen, Rafael Fierro · AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum · 2020
This paper explores a formation control design which is resilient against malfunctioning communications. The goal is to have each agent, modeled in the relative motion Hill frame, to orbit around a target point using only neighboring information. The proposed approach leverages our previous work in satellite formation control which uses a Lyapunov-based formation control solution. To mitigate the effect of malfunctioning agents communicating miss-information on the network which would cause errors in the control algorithm, each agent applies a modified weighted mean-subsequence reduced consensus algorithm to the formation control problem. This algorithm compares the communicated information on the location of the malfunctioning agents to the predefined formation cooperating agents can identify and isolate such defunct agents. Results are illustrated in a ten spacecraft simulation orbiting around a single satellite at the origin and compares the case between malfunctioning satellites and non-malfunctioning satellites.