Autonomous Local Catalog Maintenance of Close Proximity Satellite Systems on Closed Natural Motion Trajectories

TL;DR

This paper presents a supervisory control and Bayesian filtering approach for a satellite chief to maintain an updated catalog of nearby deputy satellites with relative motion, reducing onboard computational burden in space missions.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated supervisory control and Bayesian filtering framework for catalog maintenance of multiple satellites in close proximity, addressing onboard computational challenges.

Findings

Successful numerical validation with three agents

Effective supervision of agent observation scheduling

Accurate catalog updates using Bayesian filtering

Abstract

To enable space mission sets like on-orbit servicing and manufacturing, agents in close proximity maybe operating too close to yield resolved localization solutions to operators from ground sensors. This leads to a requirement on the systems need to maintain a catalog of their local neighborhood, however, this may impose a large burden on each agent by requiring updating and maintenance of this catalog at each node. To alleviate this burden, this paper considers the case of a single satellite agent (a chief) updating a single catalog. More specifically, we consider the case of numerous satellite deputy agents in a local neighborhood of a chief, the goal of the chief satellite is to maintain and update a catalog of all agents within this neighborhood through onboard measurements. We consider the agents having relative translational and attitude motion dynamics between the chief and deputy, with the chief centered at the origin of the frame. We provide an end-to-end solution of the this problem through providing both a supervisory control method coupled with a Bayesian Filter that propagates the belief state and provides the catalog solutions to the supervisor. The goal of the supervisory controller is to determine which agent to look at and at which times while adhering to constraints of the chief satellite. We provide a numerical validation to this problem with three agents.