Hierarchical Fault Diagnosis and Fuzzy Rule-Based Reasoning for Satellites Formation Flight

Formation flying is an emerging area in the Earth and space science and technology domains that utilize multiple inexpensive spacecraft by distributing the functionalities of a single platform spacecraft among miniature inexpensive platforms. Traditional spacecraft fault diagnosis and health monitoring practices involve around-the-clock monitoring, threshold checking, and trend analysis of a large amount of telemetry data by human experts that do not scale well for multiple space platforms. A novel hierarchical fault diagnosis framework and methodology is presented here that enables a systematic utilization of fuzzy rule-based reasoning to enhance the level of autonomy achievable in fault diagnosis at ground stations. Fuzzy rule-based fault diagnosis schemes for satellite formation flight are developed and investigated at different levels in the hierarchy for a leader-follower architecture. Our formation level fault diagnosis is found to be useful as a supervisory diagnosis scheme that can prompt the operators to have a closer look at the potential faulty components to determine the sources of a fault. Effectiveness of our proposed fault diagnosis methodology is demonstrated by utilizing synthetic formation flying data of five satellites that are configured in the leader-follower architecture, and are subjected to nonabrupt intermittent faults in the attitude control subsystem (ACS) and the electrical power subsystem (EPS) of the follower satellites.