Guaranteed cost dynamic output feedback control of satellite formation flying: Centralized versus decentralized control

The main objective of this paper is to develop a guaranteed cost controller synthesis method for both centralized and decentralized control of satellite formation flying architectures. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. First, guaranteed cost centralized controller design is formulated as a convex optimization problem subject to a set of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). Second, decentralized guaranteed cost output feedback control is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem subject to a set of Bilinear Matrix Inequalities (BMIs). The controller design techniques offer two main advantages over previous approaches. First, they rely only on output measurements. Second, they optimize a functional that weights the formation control energy. The simulation results for a leader-follower architecture show that the choice of a decentralized versus a centralized control scheme is an engineering trade off between communication bandwidth and control energy expenditure.