Formation flying hardware-in-the-loop simulation using a cold-gas thruster

This thesis involves a thruster hardware setup and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulation. The hardware that was used in the simulation is a cold gas thruster, which was constructed out of a solenoid valve and a nozzle with N2 gas being fed through air tubing from a compressed tank. The thruster was tested to characterize its performance. The HITL simulation is comprised of a non-linear dynamic model of two spacecraft formation flying. Fuzzy Logic and adaptive controllers were used to control the relative motion of spacecraft in formation. Fuzzy Logic controller was designed to use on-off control to reject orbital perturbations as the follower is in a relative elliptical periodic orbit. The adaptive controller was designed to maneuver the follower to a desired circular relative trajectory and maintain it in the presence of uncertainties in the model. It was shown that HITL follows closely pure simulations when compared. From the results it can be concluded that HITL is a viable way of testing thrusters and other spacecraft components.