Decentralised spacecraft manoeuvre planning

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the decentralised strategy to coordinate the reconfiguration of multiple spacecraft.

Design/methodology/approach

The system of interest consists of multiple spacecraft with independent subsystem dynamics and local constraints, but is linked through their coupling constraints. The proposed method decomposes the centralised problem into smaller subproblems. It minimises the fuel consumption of multiple spacecraft performing a reconfiguration manoeuvre through an iterative computation. In particular, each agent optimises its individual cost function using the most recently available local solution for the other agents.

Findings

The simulation scenarios include spacecraft formation reconfiguration and close manoeuvres around obstacles were conducted. The simulation results showed the fast convergence of the proposed algorithm, while local and inter-vehicle constraints were maintained.

Originality/value

The main advantage of this approach is that it adopts a linear form of the objective function. This allows the local optimisation problem to be formulated as a mixed-integer, linear programming problem, most of which can be quickly solved with resort to commercial software.

Citation

Cheng, H., Page, J., Olsen, J. and Kinkaid, N. (2014), "Decentralised spacecraft manoeuvre planning", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 86 No. 5, pp. 432-439. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEAT-12-2012-0236