Distributed control of formation flying spacecraft using deterministic communication schedulers

This paper is concerned with the formation flying control of spacecraft using a distributed architecture. Each agent uses an estimate of the formation state to compute its own actuation command. A simple deterministic scheduling strategy is first adopted for updating the estimates over a delayed data network, and the stability analysis is provided subsequently. A scheduling method for balancing the communication load among the agents is also proposed. It is assumed that different agents are coupled through their dynamics, as well as their control objectives, and that the output of each agent must track a desired reference input. Furthermore, an (open-loop) approximation of the parameter variation of the system is carried out throughout the control operation to improve the accuracy of state estimation. Simulations are given for a group of three spacecraft flying with leader-follower structure in deep space, and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.