connorfuhrman/marsupial-cubesat-sim

Decentralized Coordination of a Swarm of Nano-Spacecraft for Efficient Sample Return Using Visible Light Communication (VLC)

This repository holds the simulation code for this paper.

Functionality

The DSRC package provides functionality to simulate an arbitrary number of motherships each with an arbitrary number of cuesats which may be deployed, independently navigate, capture a sample, dock, and communicate. Simulations are available as Ray Actors which effectuate arbitrary task parallelism

Note: This is still under active development.

QuickStart

MATLAB Engine API for Python

This project relies on MATLAB so it's required to install the engine API. Instructions on this process are found at https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_external/install-the-matlab-engine-for-python.html. The basics is that there's a setup.py located at <matlabroot>/extern/engines/python which can be installed via pip. There are certain Python versions which work with certain MATLAB versions. This repo is mainly developed with Python 3.10 and MATLAB r2022b.

This repository is expected to be cross-platform as it is pure Python, however development is conducted mainly on MacOS and Ubuntu using Python 3.10.6. Around Python 3.8 should work.

git clone [email protected]:SpaceTREx-Lab/Decentralized-CubeSat-Sample-Return-using-VLC.git repodir
pip install -e repodir
python repodir/DSRC/simulation/simulation.py [--num_workers=<n parallel sims>]
open simulation_animation.mp4   # On MacOS

Passing the optional argument --num_workers with a value greater than 1 will launch the provided number of Ray Actors which will each independently run a simulation. The simulation test function sets the number of cubesats as increasing from 1 for each instantiated simulation.

The results of each simulation are used to create an animation. This is saved to an MP4 by default but you can comment that portion out and replace with plt.show() for an interactive animation (this is far faster to render at least on my laptop).

Structure

The DSRC folder is the top-level for the package. Currently there is only the simulation subpacakge which holds the simulation class (and simulation.py which can be run as a test), and the animation utilities. The simulation.spacecraft subpackage holds classes for a spacecraft (a base class), a mothership, and a cubesat. The simulation.communication holds utilities for simulating a communication link. (This is still under development and untested)