NIA | Seminars | Marwan Bikdash

NIA Seminar by Marwan Bikdash

Date: August 2, 2005
Time: 10:00am
Location: NIA, Rm 137

Formation Initialization - Choreography in Space
Marwan Bikdash, North Carolina A&T State University

Scientists now believe that planets and solar systems are very common. Still we have not been able to detect one yet because a telescope capable of detecting a dark planet light years away is prohibitively large. A solution is: Instead of sending a very large spacecraft, one can send a large number of small spacecraft which can cooperatively construct a better image of the sought-after planet using a physics concept known as interferometry. A pioneering effort in this regard is the proposed NASA StarLight mission. This mission requires several formation reconfigurations of spacecraft under severe restrictions on fuel, sun exposure, and fault tolerance.

Here we consider the scenario where a solar flare hits the formation causing a system-wide computer reset, during which the formation is broken and the spacecraft drift “lost in space”. We develop algorithms that allow the spacecraft to regain the formation. This is complicated considerably by the fact that each spacecraft has limited field of view and can “see” only ahead. What follows are meticulously choreographed maneuvers in which the spacecraft search out for their lost comrades. Bounds on the time necessary to reinitialize the formation are derived for each of the proposed algorithms.

Dr. Marwan Bikdash, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has many research projects funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Renewable Energy Laboratories, the Boeing Company, and others. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1990 and 1993 respectively. He has research experience in the control and analysis of nonlinear systems, signal processing, sensor fusion, vibration control, and fuzzy logic, and other intelligent systems. He teaches courses on control theory and practice.