A selfl-adaptive magnetic charged system for time-suboptimal formation flying maneuvers

The development of fast and reliable optimization algorithms is required in order to obtain real-time optimal trajectory on-board spacecraft. In addition, the wide spread of small satellites, due to their low costs, is leading to a greater number of satellite constellations in space. This paper presents an Improved version of the Magnetic Charged System Search (IMCSS) metaheuristic algorithm to compute time-suboptimal maneuvers for satellite formation flying. The proposed algorithm exploits some strategies aimed to improve the convergence to the optimum and it is able to self-tune its internal parameters and coefficients. Moreover, the inverse dynamics technique and the differential flatness approach, through the B-splines curves, are used to approximate the trajectory. The optimization procedure is applied to the circular J2 relative model developed by Schweighart and Sedwick and to the elliptical relative motion model developed by Yamanaka and Ankersen. The proposed algorithm provides very good results in terms of both computational efforts and efficiency.