Falsification-based Verification for Multi-Mode Spacecraft Attitude Control Systems
John Matthew Brewer, Panagiotis Tsiotras, Kendra Lang, Sean A. Phillips · 2021
In this paper, an approach to the verification and validation of satellite controllers is proposed and shown to be capable of invalidating black-box controllers against prescribed system constraints. The system being tested is a rigid-body satellite featuring a hybrid controller and operating within an environment that introduces disturbances that are not perfectly known. A falsification-based approach to the verification and validation process is taken within an optimization framework. The optimizer attempts to minimize a cost function designed from the constraints given for a particular maneuver by searching over a set of initial conditions that may result in problematic trajectories. As a result of the approach taken in this paper, the optimizer is able to find counter-example initial conditions of the satellite with a hybrid controller that result in violation of the imposed constraints.