A study on decentralized and parallel control scheme in formation flight and spacecraft systems

Current control schemes usually assume mutual exchange of information among whole members in a control system. This common strategy sometimes requests extremely heavy communication load, and the response tends to become very slow. In principle, there is no need to have such information to be gathered at the central facility just to make the system to be controlled, since it is, in most cases, associated only with each entity. The author devised a special type of decentralized approach excluding servers in the system consisting of plural members to be articulated. The method has only to share a limited number of information in the system, and leaves the performance of actuation to each entity that calculates and executes in parallel also independent of other members. This paper shows a typical example of the application to the formation flying that maintains relative distance uniformly, taking the priority into account based on the remaining fuel amount aboard each spacecraft. And the paper presents a few more applications to the spacecraft power and data management systems.