Self Assembly in Space Using Behaviour Based Intelligent Components

This paper describes a novel control scheme termed ‘equilibrium shaping’ for the control of a swarm of spacecraft in both flat and curved space. This control scheme allows the intelligent and autonomous control of an arbitrary number of elements, suitable for example to self-assembly or formation flying applications. The control scheme employs three basis behaviours that are summed together to provide a dynamical system representing the swarm of intelligent agents. Through suitable selection of parameters, this system has as equilibrium points the desired formation of the agents – thus the global behaviour of the agents is, although emergent, entirely predictable. The kinematical field resulting from the solution of this system can then be imposed on the agents using suitable control laws. The scheme is shown to exhibit emergent behavioural artifacts typical of a swarm intelligent approach.