Bi-level game-based reconfigurable control for on-orbit assembly

During on-orbit assembly, microsatellites are used to provide control ability for substructures to be assembled. Every time a substructure is assembled to the combination composed of the assembled substructures, the significant variations of the combination are not only in the mass properties, but also in the microsatellites configuration. Accordingly, this paper presents a bi-level game-based reconfigurable control method for microsatellites. At the upper level, taking each substructure with its microsatellites as a subsystem, the interaction among different subsystems is formulated as a graphical game with constraints from system and lower level, where the total control force of each subsystem corresponding to Nash equilibrium is computed in a distributed iteration manner. At the lower level, the interaction among microsatellites of one subsystem is formulated as a cooperative game with constraints from system and upper level, where the searching for Pareto optimal is nested into the iteration of the upper game. The proposed method can benefit both assembly of each substructure for the good universality and control of each microsatellite for the reduced individual burden, which is validated by numerical simulations.(C) 2022 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.