Self-Organizing and Scalable Shape Formation for a Swarm of Pico Satellites

We present a scalable and distributed control strategy for swarms of satellites to autonomously form an hexagonal lattice in space around a predefined meeting point. The control strategy is modeled as an artificial potential field. Such potential field is split in two main terms: a local potential is used to form locally hexagonal lattices based on the well known Lennard-Jones potential, and a global potential used to join the lattices into a single one. The control strategy uses only simple local information about few neighbouring satellites and assumes that each satellite can estimate its position with respect to the meeting point. Experiments show the results of the method with up to 500 satellites. The proposed method is general and can be adapted to build different kinds of lattices and shapes.