Attitude Task Allocation and Control in a Swarm of Magnetically Controlled CubeSats

in CDSR 2021 conference proceedings, 8th International Conference on Control, Dynamic Systems, and Robotics (CDSR'21) (2021)

The paper delineates the magnetic controller gains tuning procedure for an active magnetic attitude control system of a CubeSat in the ISS orbit. The optimization is conducted for arbitrary required ... [more ▼]

The paper delineates the magnetic controller gains tuning procedure for an active magnetic attitude control system of a CubeSat in the ISS orbit. The optimization is conducted for arbitrary required attitude given in the orbital reference frame of the spacecraft. The study has been conducted as a part of the Skoltech University project to deploy a swarm of 3U CubeSats for collective gamma-ray bursts detection, which requires the satellites' coordinated attitude control. We consider four identical CubeSats exhibiting swarm behaviour by optimal attitude task allocation on receipt of a command from the mission control center. The first part of this study shows how to obtain the controller gains via linearization of the spacecraft rotational dynamics in the vicinity of the required attitude regime and subsequent numerical optimization (carried out in terms of Floquet theory). The second part shows the collective attitude control scenario. The task of the swarm is to ensure maximum sky coverage around a principal direction uplinked to the spacecraft. The task extends to ensuring the maximum collective stability of the swarm through implementing the optimization algorithm. [less ▲]