Session
Technical Session VI: Small but Mighty
Abstract
Future spacecraft missions are trending towards the use of distributed systems or fractionated spacecraft. Initiatives such as DARPA’s System F6 are encouraging the satellite community to explore smaller, lower cost, and more robust solutions to replace the conventional monoliths in LEO today. Enabling collaborative behaviors among teams or formations of pico-satellites requires technology development in several subsystem areas including attitude determination and control, orbit determination and maintenance capabilities, as well as a means to maintain accurate knowledge of team member’s state. This paper presents a collaborative module, designed with the CubeSat framework in mind, to provide autonomous on-board orbit determination as well as inter-satellite link capabilities for maintaining state knowledge and sharing sensor data among a formation. The end goal is to enable collaborative behaviors while reducing inter-satellite communication to realize significant power savings. Simulation results indicate an average 75% reduction in the amount of inter-satellite communication with some scenarios showing more than a 90% reduction. Furthermore, parallel implementations of the described algorithms indicate further power savings is achievable by using multicore microcontrollers with core throttling.
Presentation Slides
Enabling Collaborative Behavior among CubeSats
Future spacecraft missions are trending towards the use of distributed systems or fractionated spacecraft. Initiatives such as DARPA’s System F6 are encouraging the satellite community to explore smaller, lower cost, and more robust solutions to replace the conventional monoliths in LEO today. Enabling collaborative behaviors among teams or formations of pico-satellites requires technology development in several subsystem areas including attitude determination and control, orbit determination and maintenance capabilities, as well as a means to maintain accurate knowledge of team member’s state. This paper presents a collaborative module, designed with the CubeSat framework in mind, to provide autonomous on-board orbit determination as well as inter-satellite link capabilities for maintaining state knowledge and sharing sensor data among a formation. The end goal is to enable collaborative behaviors while reducing inter-satellite communication to realize significant power savings. Simulation results indicate an average 75% reduction in the amount of inter-satellite communication with some scenarios showing more than a 90% reduction. Furthermore, parallel implementations of the described algorithms indicate further power savings is achievable by using multicore microcontrollers with core throttling.
