Abstract The High Contrast Imaging Laboratory at Princeton University has been researching and testing telescope/starshade technology for over a decade. Currently, one of the main challenges of using such technology is the need to design controllers for formation flying to maximize the number of targets accessible for a given mission. For that reason, this paper details the design and implementation of a formation flying hardware-in-the-loop simulation in the existing Princeton Starshade Testbed to validate formation sensing and control algorithms while maintaining high contrast with a flight-like starshade. In particular, trajectory tracking is achieved through a linear quadratic controller with integral action and estimation is done with an unscented Kalman filter. An important aspect of the performance of the proposed control and estimation strategy is that it includes the use of a pupil imaging sensor of the starshade's diffraction pattern for high-precision position determination. We also present initial experimental results showing that the control strategy yields fast processing times, small position errors, robust steady-state, and low values of total Δ v , all helping advance the starshade technology gap of formation sensing and control.

中文翻译：

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星影任务编队飞行控制和传感算法的硬件在环测试

摘要 普林斯顿大学高对比度成像实验室十多年来一直在研究和测试望远镜/星影技术。目前，使用这种技术的主要挑战之一是需要设计用于编队飞行的控制器，以最大限度地增加给定任务可访问的目标数量。因此，本文详细介绍了在现有普林斯顿遮光罩测试平台中编队飞行硬件在环仿真的设计和实现，以验证编队传感和控制算法，同时与类似飞行的遮光罩保持高对比度。特别是，轨迹跟踪是通过具有积分作用的线性二次控制器实现的，估计是通过无迹卡尔曼滤波器完成的。所提出的控制和估计策略性能的一个重要方面是它包括使用遮光罩衍射图案的瞳孔成像传感器进行高精度位置确定。我们还展示了初步实验结果，表明该控制策略产生快速处理时间、小位置误差、稳健稳态和低总 Δ v 值，所有这些都有助于推进编队传感和控制的遮光技术差距。