Design automation of embedded air coils for CubeSat attitude control

Embedded air coils are magnetic actuators commonly used for detumbling, coarse attitude control, and angular momentum dumping in the side panels of nanosatellites. Side panels feature complex contours, pockets, through-hole connectors, vias, and keep-out areas thus making it difficult to design optimized coil geometries into them. In this work we present the automated magnetorquer design developed in the scope of the NanoFF mission at TU Berlin. The mission aims to demonstrate formation flight with two 2U CubeSats featuring a propulsion system. The subsystems of the spacecraft negatively influence the available board area on the side panels and all side panels are different. Kitorquer, a KiCAD action plugin, detects the side panel geometry and generates an optimized coil given a set of user-defined constraints. We give a quick introduction into magnetorquer optimization, the plugin implementation, resulting coil geometries, and plugin validation based on the side panels manufactured for the NanoFF mission. We provide an outlook on the application of the plugin for the design of PocketQube side panels carried out by the authors for the HYPE mission of AGH University, Poland which has strict constraints on available board area and power budget.