Assessment of decentralized satellite formation control with distributed hardware-in-the-loop testbeds

Decentralized architectures may offer advantages in comparison to centralized schemes for maintaining and establishing satellite formations. and constellations. For example, because they are non-hierarchical and exploit parallelism, decentralized control approaches potentially offer reliability and graceful degradation under failure scenarios that may be difficult to match with a centralized approach. Offsetting such advantages is additional complexity, in the form of additional data processing at each node and additional inter-nodal communications channels, and the relatively lower level of application proven technology maturity for decentralized approaches. A complete characterization of the costs and benefits of the centralized/decentralized design trade is difficult to achieve in a monolithic software simulation. To better address these issues, several hardware in the loop distributed computing test-beds are under development. This paper provides a status report on a collaborative research effort that is studying the implementation of decentralized control schemes for satellite formations in such testbeds.