Assessment of decentralized satellite formation control with distributed hardware-in-the-loop testbeds

• Main Authors: Carpenter, J.R., Speyer, J.L., Chichka, D.F., Ananyev, S., Belanger, G.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Application software; Communication channels; Computational modeling; Data processing; Degradation; Distributed control; Maintenance; Parallel processing; Satellites; Testing
• DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2002.1035621

Decentralized architectures may offer advantages in comparison to centralized schemes for maintaining and establishing satellite formations. and constellations. For example, because they are non-hierarchical and exploit parallelism, decentralized control approaches potentially offer reliability and graceful degradation under failure scenarios that may be difficult to match with a centralized approach. Offsetting such advantages is additional complexity, in the form of additional data processing at each node and additional inter-nodal communications channels, and the relatively lower level of application proven technology maturity for decentralized approaches. A complete characterization of the costs and benefits of the centralized/decentralized design trade is difficult to achieve in a monolithic software simulation. To better address these issues, several hardware in the loop distributed computing test-beds are under development. This paper provides a status report on a collaborative research effort that is studying the implementation of decentralized control schemes for satellite formations in such testbeds.