Abstract:

Aerospace navigation and control is one of the latest and fast developing field. It has created many avenues for research and development and businesses as many of the system are becoming satellite based. That is why huge number of private companies are coming in aerospace business therefore there is a large demand of professionals who can deal with the Navigation and Control of the On-Board satellites as well as its ground station. Universities all-around the world are trying to use the small satellites to train the students for the emerging Aerospace industry. In this paper we have presented the design for a compact course for the graduate and undergraduate students to learn the basic development process for the satellites navigation and control. A design of a four week course has been presented for the universities to adapt it in their curriculum. This course is based on an indigenously designed Floating Satellite which was developed in the Chair of Aerospace Information Technology at the University of Würzburg (Germany) . This course is designed around this Floating Satellite (FloatSat) system in order to help students understand and get familiar with basic satellite subsystems and also to develop and test different attitude control algorithms and strategies for small satellites in an almost frictionless environment similar to that in space. The first week of the course starts from the basics of a Real-time Object Oriented Dependable Operating systems (RODOS ) which is specially designed for Aerospace Applications jointly by German Aerospace Center and University of Würzburg. The second week deals with the Embedded System Programming under the Hardware Abstraction Layer of the RODOS for the IMU, Light , Temperature and Current sensors. In the third week students should develop the Control Algorithms for the Operating Modes of the Satellite and In the fourth week we have designed the experiments for the development of a ground station which is a GUI based on a PC and connected with FloatSat via the bluetooth. The communication is being done through a simple gateway layer of RODOS, students will have to design simple graphical displays for the Telemetry and Telecommand of the FloatSat.

Keywords:

Floating-Satellite, Cascaded Algorithms, Hardware Abstraction Layer, Gateway for Ground Station.