关键词: 微小卫星群落, 姿态同步, 自适应控制, 立方体卫星, 微脉冲等离子推进器

Abstract: To achieve the mission requirement of the state agreement within a small-satellite swarm composed of multiple CubeSats,an attitude synchronization control strategy of the CubeSat swarm based on adaptive control was proposed.Considering both undirected and directed swarm,an attitude dynamic model for the small-satellite swarm was constructed by introducing the synchronization signals,which reflected the interconnections of adjacent CubeSats.Based on the pairwise difference amongst the adjacent CubeSat,an adaptive controller was designed to improve the attitude synchronization of the swarm.Concerning the multi-unit CubeSat composed of standard modulars with a Micro-Pulse Plasma Thruster (μ-PPT) electric propulsion system,the three-axis attitude was adjusted based on discrete pulse control for CubeSat.Moreover,each CubeSat performed μ-PPT pulse adjustment by searching for the optimal pulse sequence combination,such that the attitude states eventually tended to be same and simultaneously the external disturbances were also continuously compensated.Through the simulation analysis of attitude synchronization for a networked CubeSat swarm,the results showed that the attitude synchronization of the CubeSat swarm could be effectively achieved under various information exchange modes based on the proposed adaptive control law and the μ-PPT propulsion system.

Key words: small satellite swarm, attitude synchronization, adaptive control, CubeSat, micro-pulse plasma thruster