Master thesis and internship[BR]- Master's thesis : Preliminary design of a Guidance, Navigation, and Control design tool for Earth observation satellites[BR]- Integration Internship : Voeware

Abstract

VEOGNC is a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) simulator tool developed by VEOWARE, a Belgian New Space startup. It allows users to design controllers for a spacecraft using a variety of actuating, sensing, and control techniques. The company already developed and currently sells Control Moment Gyroscopes as well as reaction wheels. It now wishes to expand its capabilities in the field of control and simulation, which would also provide tools to help its clients configure satellites. In particular, robust controllers make satellites resilient to the harsh conditions of the space environment and are critical to many missions. In other words, the aim of the work undertaken in the scope of this master's thesis and internship was to build a set of tools using MATLAB and Simulink and create models of actuators and sensors. In addition, the simulator must provide the user with useful tools and metrics to evaluate performance. This work reviews the scientific literature, selects models, implements said models in numerical tools, and finally, provides tests and validations. The result of this work is VEOGNC, a set of MATLAB scripts, a Simulink simulator of a GNC system, and a user interface. These three components were designed to work together and give a basis upon which future work will be able to improve. Additionally, several guidance modes corresponding to different control scenarios, are available to the user. Finally, the tool is now capable of helping in the design of satellite control and is open to the addition of further capabilities such as new actuators and sensors.