Optimal reconfiguration of formation flying spacecraft--a decentralized approach

Oliver Junge, Jerrold Marsden, and Sina Ober-Blöbaum

Proc. 45th IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control, (2006), 5210-5215

Abstract:

This paper introduces a hierarchical, decentralized, and parallelizable method for dealing with optimization problems with many agents. It is theoretically based on a hierarchical optimization theorem that establishes the equivalence of two forms of the problem, and this idea is implemented using DMOC (Discrete Mechanics and Optimal Control). The result is a method that is scalable to certain optimization problems for large numbers of agents, whereas the usual “monolithic” approach can only deal with systems with a rather small number of degrees of freedom. The method is illustrated with the example of deployment of spacecraft, motivated by the Darwin (ESA) and Terrestrial Planet Finder (NASA) missions.