Distributed Impulsive Satellite Swarm-Keeping Based on Connectivity and Relative Cartesian States

Topological connectivity, which is the minimum requirement for a swarm to cooperate, was exploited to design control strategies for satellite swarm-keeping. Low fuel consumption is expected to be achieved by imposing only this minimum requirement on the relative motion. A distributed topology regulation method was adopted to maintain connectivity via proper topology switching with variations in intersatellite distances in free motion. Intersatellite distance-keeping control was only activated when free relative motion would otherwise disrupt connectivity of all possible topologies or when collision avoidance was needed. Velocity impulse commands for relative distance control were generated according to the relative states between critical satellite pairs. A distributed protocol was proposed to integrate the pairwise velocity impulse commands to obtain the impulse to be implemented for each satellite. The convergence of the protocol was theoretically guaranteed. The simulation of 10-day swarm-keeping for 50 satellites in low Earth orbit under the influence of the Earth’s nonspherical [Formula: see text] term demonstrated that the swarm could be kept in bounded relative motion with an average velocity impulse of approximately 0.038 m/s per day and an average number of velocity impulses of approximately 1.22 per orbit for each satellite, and collisions could be eliminated in the steady state.