Investigation of the technology of mutual navigation and orientation of small space vehicles flying in formation

The paper presents the problem of ensuring support of the flight of a group of small spacecraft (microsatellites) taking into account the small mutual distances between them. The purpose of using the orbital constellation specified is to create a radio communication system to control remote objects like unmanned aerial vehicles and ground robots located in hard-to-reach areas of the Earth from the Central ground station. To reduce the cost of microsatellite design, it was decided to rigidly fix the receiving and transmitting antennas on their housings and use the spatial orientation of the entire apparatus for antenna guidance. This seriously complicated the tasks of navigation and orientation of microsatellites in a formation and required the development of a new method for determining the orientation of a single microsatellite. The essence of the method is to process the image obtained by means of a video camera mounted on a nearby microsatellite. We used methods of computer vision. The results of mathematical modeling simulation, as well as the results of full-scale bench experiment confirming the efficiency of the proposed method are presented.