Fully decentralized cooperative navigation for spacecraft constellations

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Qin, Tong and Macdonald, Malcolm and Qiao, Dong (2021) Fully decentralized cooperative navigation for spacecraft constellations. IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, 57 (4). pp. 2383-2394. ISSN 0018-9251 (https://doi.org/10.1109/TAES.2021.3060734)

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Abstract

This article proposes a method to decentralize the navigation burden and improve the fault tolerance for a spacecraft constellation. The constellation body reference system is introduced, which is the perifocal frame of one satellite in the constellation. The structure of the proposed navigation method is constructed to enable each spacecraft to estimate its own orbit in this body reference system. This step is essentially the relative orbit determination (OD) based on inter-satellite range measurements. Thereafter, the approach to transfer an orbit from the constellation body reference system to an inertial reference system is developed. The essential requirements on absolute measurements to realize the coordinate transfer are presented. By dividing the absolute OD into relative OD and coordinate transfer, each navigation subsystem operated in a spacecraft can be independent with others, and the absolute measurements collected by any spacecraft can contribute to the absolute OD of the whole constellation. The proposed method applies to constellations in any geometric configuration. A Walker constellation is taken as an example for numerical simulations. The results show that the proposed method has a lower computation burden compared to an integrated navigation system. With the same type of absolute measurements, the proposed method has higher accuracy and convergence velocity than conventional decentralized algorithms. When a spacecraft occurs with fault, the orbit results of other spacecraft are not affected using the proposed method, which is beyond the ability of conventional methods.

ORCID iDs

Qin, Tong, Macdonald, Malcolm ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4499-4281 and Qiao, Dong;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:75317
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    31 August 2021
    Published
    22 February 2021
    Published Online
    20 January 2021
    Accepted
    Notes:© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
    Subjects:Technology > Mechanical engineering and machinery
    Department:Faculty of Engineering > Electronic and Electrical Engineering
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:04 Feb 2021 15:20
    Last modified:16 Dec 2024 02:23
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/75317
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