Brief Synchronized multiple spacecraft rotations

  • Authors:

  • Jonathan R. Lawton;Randal W. Beard

  • Affiliations:

  • Raytheon Systems Inc., Tucson, AZ 85734, USA;Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA

  • Venue:
  • Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

The objective of this paper is to present formation control laws for maintaining attitude alignment among a group of spacecraft in either deep space or earth orbit. The paper presents two control strategies based on emergent behavior approaches. Each control strategy considers the desired formation behaviors of convergence to the final formation goal, formation keeping, and the desire to rotate the spacecraft about fixed axes. The first approach uses velocity feedback and the second approach used passivity-based damping. In addition, we prove analytically that our approach guarantees formation keeping throughout the maneuver. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.