Title :
Assessment of decentralized satellite formation control with distributed hardware-in-the-loop testbeds
Author :
Carpenter, J. Russell ; Speyer, Jason L. ; Chichka, David F. ; Ananyev, Slava ; Belanger, Gene
Author_Institution :
Guidance, Navigation, & Control Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Abstract :
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.
Keywords :
aerospace control; aerospace testing; artificial satellites; decentralised control; distributed processing; decentralized control approaches; decentralized satellite formation control; distributed computing test-beds; distributed hardware-in-the-loop testbeds; failure scenarios; inter-nodal communications channels; monolithic software simulation; reliability; satellite constellations; Application software; Communication channels; Computational modeling; Data processing; Degradation; Distributed control; Maintenance; Parallel processing; Satellites; Testing;
Conference_Titel :
Aerospace Conference Proceedings, 2002. IEEE
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-7231-X
DOI :
10.1109/AERO.2002.1035621