Spacecraft Formation Control with Intermittent Measurement and Communication
Sean A. Phillips, Christopher Petersen, Rafael Fierro · AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum · 2021
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-1341.vid In this paper, we consider the problem of spacecraft formation control in the Hill’s frame with intermittent information. Namely, the satellites are allowed to cooperate by sharing information directly to asymptotically converge to a prespecified formation; wherein, the formation is defined by a fuel-efficient ellipse and circumnavigates around a point, on a plane, and with a designated inter-satellite angle. In this work, we provide the Lyapunov-based formation control algorithm for continuous-time systems which is shown to be asymptotically stable in previous works, is actually practically asymptotically stable to intermittent communications and measurements. We illustrate the results in the case of a ten satellite formation reaching a 2×1 fuel-efficient elliptical orbit with a predefined phase about the origin.