International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There is an increasing desire in many organizations, including NASA and the DoD, to use
constellations or fleets of autonomous spacecraft working together to accomplish complex mission
objectives. At the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate we are
investigating and developing architectures for commanding and controlling a cluster of cooperating
satellites. For many space missions, large monolithic satellites are required to meet mission
requirements. In many cases this results in costly satellites which are more complex, more
susceptible to failure, and which have performance characteristics that are less than optimal due to
realistic physical size limitations. Recently various organizations have begun to explore how
distributed clusters of cooperating satellites can replace their larger monolithic counterparts resulting
in an overall cost reduction, enhanced mission performance, and increased system fault tolerance.
Large clusters of satellites flying in formation are required to have some level of on-board autonomy
in order to: fly within specified tolerance levels; perform collision avoidance; address fault detection,
isolation, and resolution (FDIR); share knowledge; and plan and schedule activities. In addition,
from an operations standpoint, commanding and controlling a large cluster of satellites can be very
burdensome for ground operators. At AFRL we are addressing these issues by development of an
on-board Cluster Management system which will, in essence, provide the capability to treat a cluster
of satellites as a single virtual satellite. A systems level approach is being taken, therefore from a
ground perspective the ground control station must also be able to treat the cluster as a virtual
satellite. [1]
This paper will describe our Cluster Management system, which is the intelligent entity that is
responsible for making cluster level decisions and which enables the satellite cluster to function as a
virtual satellite. The cluster manager functionality can be broken down into the following five areas:
• Command and control
• Cluster data management
• Formation flying
• Fault management
• On-board Planning
This paper will contain a detailed description of the Cluster Manager architecture along with its
various modules.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/605333 |
| Date | 10 1900 |
| Creators | Zetocha, Paul |
| Contributors | Kirtland Air Force Base |
| Publisher | International Foundation for Telemetering |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Proceedings |
| Rights | Copyright © International Foundation for Telemetering |
| Relation | http://www.telemetry.org/ |
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