Control of Two Satellites Relative Motion over the Packet Erasure Communication Channel with Limited Transmission Rate Based on Adaptive Coder

Abstract

The paper deals with the navigation data exchange between two satellites moving in a swarm. It is focused on the reduction of the inter-satellite demanded communication channel capacity taking into account the dynamics of the satellites relative motion and possible erasures in the channel navigation data. The feedback control law is designed ensuring the regulation of the relative satellites motion. The adaptive binary coding/decoding procedure for the satellites navigation data transmission over the limited capacity communication channel is proposed and studied for the cases of ideal and erasure channels. Results of the numerical study of the closed-loop system performance and accuracy of the data transmission algorithm on the communication channel bitrate and erasure probability are obtained by extensive simulations. It is shown that both data transmission error and regulation time depend approximately inversely proportionally on the communication rate. In addition the erasure of data in the channel with probability up to 0.3 does not influence the regulation time for sufficiently high data transmission rate.