Abstract
A better comprehension of the formation of Saturn's rings is crucial to understand our solar system. Many questions remain unanswered despite the successes of the Cassini and Voyager missions to Saturn. Traditional large spacecraft prove to be problematic within planetary rings because collisions and consequent mission failure increase dramatically in the rings’ dynamically dense environment. Using a swarm of small unmanned probes with decentralized control and communication structures that are equipped with research instruments distributed amongst the swarm is a possible solution. This paper presents a novel, decentralized consensus-based tracking control algorithm for guiding such a swarm. This control algorithm is characterized by a trajectory generator based on worst-case assumptions about both communication structures and the ring particle environment. Optimal model parameters, numerically calculated through the Monte Carlo method with the goal of minimizing fuel consumption and avoiding collisions, are used to generate an optimal reference trajectory for the swarm of spacecraft. A feedback tracking control with the optimal reference trajectory is designed under the assumption of unreliable and non-instantaneous communication among individual swarm agents. The effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm is validated numerically in MATLAB/Simulink.
Published Version
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