State Omniscience for Cooperative Local Catalog Maintenance of Close Proximity Satellite Systems

In space mission sets like on-orbit servicing and manufacturing, agents in close proximity may be operating too close to yield resolved localization solutions to operators from ground sensors. This leads to the requirement that the system maintains a catalog of its local neighborhood; however, this imposes a large burden on each agent to update its catalog. To alleviate this burden, this paper considers the case of a multiple satellites each maintaining their own catalog. More specifically, we consider the case of numerous noncooperative objects and a collection of agents operating in the same local environment. The goal of each agent satellite is to maintain and update their catalog of all bodies within this neighborhood through onboard measurements and cooperative communication with the other agents. Therefore, this work considers a graph theoretical approach to modeling a space-based scenario where a multi-satellite system is tasked with tracking each other and a set of noncooperative bodies in the region. However, each of the satellites are subject to field-of-view constraints on both the angles-only measurement sensor and communication antenna. We consider the agents having relative translational and attitude motion dynamics between the chief and deputy, with the chief centered at the origin of the frame.