Formation flying of spacecrafts for monitoring and inspection

Formation flying of multiple spacecrafts has been an essential of interest in space technology. Groups of spacecrafts involved in formation can provide higher performance with comparable lower cost in many space applications. This thesis presents the work on studying the formation flying control issues of two satellites with close separation between each other in the LEO orbit under the Leader/Follower architecture. Within this hierarchical structure, Follower is controlled in order to find a fuel-optimal path to the entry of the pre-designed formation orbit, maintain it and maneuver for formation reconfiguration with optimal control - Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). Besides, noise and communication failures are taken into consideration which bring uncertainties to the linearized system dynamics provided by the modified Hill-Clohessy-Wiltshire (HCW) Equations. Thus nonlinear Sliding Mode Control (SMC) and Kalman filter are necessarily employed for precise requirements. The theoretical results are supported by simulation platform based on MATLAB.Validerat; 20101217 (root