Development of a software simulator for small satellite swarm control

This article is devoted to creating a control code to simulate the complicated type of flight of a group of small spacecraft in formation, called swarms of spacecraft. The Swarm project with integrated Fem satellites on a silicon wafer (SWIFT) Jet Propulsion Laboratories is a new, a paradigm-changing definition of spacecraft technology that could provide swarms of fully capable femtosatellites to fly. These swarms have the capacity to be used as optical relays, distributed antennas, or for mass distribution probing applications, among others. In this article, a swarm is defined as a collection of hundreds to thousands of homogeneous spacecraft, and a femtosat is defined as a satellite weighing about 100 g. Because of their small size, femtosats have limited probing, actuation, and computational capabilities, requiring that the swarm guidance and control algorithms be both motor and computationally efficient.In the article for testing the SS swarm control system, a virtual software simulator is developed. This simulator is written in Matlab R2015b in C ++ programming language. The simulator, using flight parameters, creates a simulation and shows the reaction of the SS in different situations.The simulator checks the flight path of the SS according to the task algorithm. During testing of the SSA flight orientation, the accuracy of hitting the target as well as the reduction and elimination of collision with other objects during the flight path is calculated.This virtual software simulator is designed for virtual testing of any group of SS.The virtual software simulator is used in the field of space research activities by space industry specialists with higher education.