Design of Thruster Control Allocation for a Cubesat

Design of Thruster Control Allocation for a Cubesat Recently, Cubesats have gained prominence in the aerospace industry due to their cost-effectiveness, short development cycle, and compact size (typically 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm). Additionally, advancements in technology have facilitated the integration of various functionalities required for a wide range of scientific, commercial, and technological missions. Despite these advantages, their limited fuel-carrying capacity should be considered a challenge for research. This limitation raises a critical issue regarding fuel consumption, which must be optimized to maximize the life of CubeSat satellites. The optimization of fuel consumption can be explored in the context of an overactuated system, where the number of actuators exceeds the degrees of freedom. In such a scenario, it becomes essential to determine the optimal allocation of the control input among multiple actuators, which is commonly referred to as control allocation. Moreover, this thesis also assumes that the thrusters of the Cubesat can be deflected relatively to the main body using gimbal mechanisms. Consequently, the resulting optimization problem aims to identify the optimal thruster configuration and allocation of the control input. To evaluate the proposed allocation strategy, the entire system is tested in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. A mission scenario is chosen by considering a couple of different maneuvers, different types of thruster configuration and different types of CubeSats. Finally,the effectiveness of each control allocation strategy is evaluated by analyzing the delta-V required in such a mission scenario.