Micro-spacecraft swarm navigation and control

Building on our prior work on modelling the dynamics and control of swarms of free-flying micro-spacecraft we are currently developing a 3x3 cm PCB-satellite with a microcontroller, MEMS inertial measurement unit and magnetorquers. Recent work has also investigated closed-loop attitude control of our PCB-satellite, including laboratory testing in a small Helmholtz cage.

While the development of a single PCB-satellite will explore the level of functionality that can be embedded in a single device, a new challenge for this project will be the development of multiple devices to form a coherent swarm. Swarms of such devices could enable massively parallel sensing of the space environment, for example to detect space weather events.

Aims and objectives:

Key research questions include:

How can a swarm of PCB-satellites determine and control their relative position, and what sensors, actuators and inter-satellite communication links are required?

Can emergent, self-organising behaviours be engineered into such a swarm through the integration of low-level behaviour-based control in each swarm member?

Can machine intelligence be used to fuse sensed data from the swarm to deliver entirely new services and satellite applications with massively parallel distributed sensing?

Novelty of the research methodology:

The project will combine modelling, simulation and laboratory-scale development to investigate these research questions, while also exploring future applications of micro-spacecraft swarms.

Alignment to Research Council's strategies and research areas:

The project will pursue low TRL, underpinning research on distributed sensors swarms in space. The work has potential impacts across Engineering and Digital Economy.

Any companies or collaborators involved:

The project will link to the supervisor's Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, which is investigating space technologies at extremes of the length-scale.