Task and attitude control scheduling of multiple agile satellites considering task-dependent transition time

Abstract

This paper proposes a Task and Attitude Control Scheduling (TACS) framework considering the attitude dynamics of satellites. An important factor in satellite scheduling is the modeling of attitude transition time between observation tasks. A robust transition time model provides feasible results while degrading the solution quality, and vice versa. In this paper, the satellites’ hardware specification information is combined with an attitude control law to model the attitude transition times between scheduled tasks with high accuracy. After computing the potential transition time values, they are saved to an Attitude Transition Table (ATT), which is used for a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. The task schedule is obtained using the formulated MILP, which is then used to generate the control moment gyro (CMG) command for attitude control of satellites. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a case study with up to 1,000 observation tasks around East Asia.