| We designed a very simple station-keeping movement controller for micro-satellites. We implemented this design in both Matlab/Simulink and OPNET Modeler. We assumed movement simulated by Matlab/Simulink is "correct".; OPNET Modeler supports discrete-event simulations, but was not designed to support continuous-time simulations (i.e., movement in space). Hence the correctness and performance of our movement simulation in OPNET Modeler needed to be checked with respect to Matlab/Simulink.; Engineers face this kind of problem whenever they extend a simulation tool outside its domain of targeted phenomena. By varying the movement calculation period Tcalc (i.e., packet inter-arrival time) in OPNET Modeler, we tuned the OPNET model arbitrarily close to the Matlab/Simulink model.; We designed a factorial experiment to investigate the correlation of Tcalc, satellite mass m, "springiness" of the satellite's station-keeping controller k, initial satellite position x0, and initial satellite speed nu0 to root mean square (RMS) error of OPNET's position xopnet time history with respect to the corresponding correct position xopnet time history. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
