Communication area estimation for decentralized control of nanosatellites swarm

Abstract

The problem of relative drift elimination between the satellites in the swarm is considered in the paper. The proposed decentralized control takes into account a communication constraint such as limited size of communication area. Only the satellites within the communication area can be identified by relative motion determination system. The control aim is to eliminate the mean relative drift between all the satellites inside the communication area. The purpose of the work is to study the performance of the proposed decentralized control algorithm. It is shown that the system matrix of differential equations for the vector of relative drifts is related to the Laplacian matrix of the communication graph. In the case of the connected swarm, all but one eigenvalues of the system are negative, and the remaining one is equal to zero. It means that all the relative drifts converge to the same value under the proposed control. The speed of convergence is defined by the minimum absolute eigenvalue that depends on the graph topology. The initial drift and the convergence speed make it possible to estimate the communication distance that provides the connectivity of the graph. Considering normally distributed errors of the initial velocity after the launch, it is possible to estimate the distance between any two satellites after the convergence. It allows us to estimate the communication distance that ensures the relative drift elimination between all the satellites in the swarm. The obtained estimations are validated using Monte Carlo simulations. In numerical simulations the swarm of 3U CubeSats in low-Earth orbit is considered. The decentralized control is implemented by differential aerodynamic drag via the change of cross-sectional area using onboard reaction wheels.