Shilu Chen

Work place: School of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China

E-mail: chenshilu@nwpu.edu.cn

Website:

Research Interests: Engineering

Biography

Prof. Chen was born on September, 1920. He received the B.Sc. and Kandidat Nauk degrees from Tsinghua University and Moscow Aviation Institute in 1945 and 1958 respectively. He is a Chinese academy of engineering and foreign academician of Russia space academy of sciences. He is a recognized expert of Flight Dynamics and Control of Elastic Aircraft.

Author Articles
Pattern Formation in Swarming Spacecrafts using Tersoff-Brenner Potential Field

By Zhifeng Zeng Yihua Tang Shilu Chen Min Xu

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijisa.2013.06.01, Pub. Date: 8 May 2013

We present a distributed control strategy that lets a swarm of spacecrafts autonomously form a lattice in orbit around a planet. The system, based on the artificial potential field approach, proposes a novel way to divide the artificial field into two main terms: a global artificial potential field mainly based on the famous C-W equations that gathers the spacecrafts around a predefined meeting point, and a local term exploited the well-known Tersoff-Brenner potential that allows a spacecraft to place itself in the correct position relative to its closest neighbors. Moreover, in order to obtain convergence from all initial distributions of the spacecrafts, a dissipation term depended on the velocity of agent is introduced. The new methodology is demonstrated in the problem of forming a hexagon lattice, the structure unit of graphite. It is shown that a pattern formation can operate around a planet. By slightly changing the scenario our method can be easily applied to shape other configurations, such as a regular tetrahedron (with central point), the structure unit, etc.

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