Development of a ROS2 flight software framework & Attitude Control application for nanosatellites

The aim of this thesis work is linked to a new R&D project owned by Tyvak International and is intended to demonstrate and implement a preliminary ROS2 based flight software framework applied it to a complex system like a nanosatellite. ROS2 is an open source set of libraries and tools for developing robotic applications and it is chosen since its usage is becoming very popular in mechatronics applications for its simplicity, modularity and it also provides built-in tools for simulation and debugging and a toolbox to easily integrate it with Matlab/Simulink. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to the hardware setup and the development of the software in ROS2. The ROS2 system is tested by using a Raspberry Pi connected with a sensor module customized by Tyvak instrumented with a temperature sensor, magnetometer and sun sensor. The following applications are implemented by using ROS2 nodes: watchdog node to control the correct status of the most relevant nodes; sensors nodes to read data from both I2C and SPI bus and telemetry node to collect data read from the sensors. In the second part of the thesis work, the attitude control application is studied and the control algorithms analysed are converted into code via auto-generation in simulink. In particular the “detumble phase” and a “Earth pointing” control scenarios are simulated in Matlab/Simulink by modelling a nanosatellite in orbit and its actuators.