Research On Relative Attitude Determination And Control For Formation Flying Satellites

As an important part of autonomous relative navigation and control for formation flying satellites, the relative attitude autonomous determination and control are of great importance to improve the autonomy and viability of formation, reduce the ground maintenance requirements. This dissertation takes system demonstration and validation of small satellites formation flying as the background, the theory and algorithms of relative attitude determination based on the GPS like sensors are investigated; the relative attitude coordinated control law, multi-agent based formation flying architecture and the coordination strategy are designed. The main contributions are as follows:First, two types of relative navigation approaches are studied detailedly. Case 1: when there is no relative measurement, each satellite uses its own on-board attitude sensors to determine its attitude, and exchange the information through the communication link between formation satellites, and then the relative attitude is determined through simple mathematical operation. Case 2: Based on the range measurements of GPS like sensors, using two-point measurement of the relative orbit state to establish relative orbit and attitude kinematics and measuring equations. And state estimation is achieved through the Extended Kalman Filter technology and Unscented Kalman Filter technology, respectively. Simulation results indicate that both approaches are simple, effective and suitable for precise relative navigation.Secondly, considering the autonomous running and governing requirements for formation flying satellites, this thesis analyses the advamtages of introducing the agent technology into the satellite formation based on the concept of agent. So some studies on the Multi-Agent based vertically layered architecture and general coordination scheme of the formation are done, and the detailed functions of each sub-agent are described. In the end, a kind of fully distributed coordination strategy for the relative control of formation flying satellites is given.Finally, based on the coordination strategy mentioned above, considering the...