AN OBJECT-ORIENTED MODELING APPROACH TO INTELLIGENT VARIABLE GEOMETRYTRUSSES

Since an intelligent variable geometry truss (IVGT) is usually equippe d with large umbers of redundant actuators for the sake of providing a daptivity, a distributed control is considered a promising approach to dealing with its motion control. In this case, a modeling approach an d an integrated model is a key to constructing distributed control sys tems from both hardware and software. To this end, this paper proposes an object-oriented modeling approach. Through decomposing the control problem domain underlying VGTs into objects, an object model can be o btained to represent various object abstractions and the relationships among these objects, It is shown in this paper that an object model o f VGTs is exactly the integrated model for their knowledge organizatio ns as well as the control architectures. Two control schemes resulting from the object models-a hierarchical distributed control and an auto nomous distributed control-are discussed in particular, To verify the concepts addressed in this paper, an experimental prototype of IVGTs w as manufactured, with a two-level hierarchical distributed control sys tem equipped, With this prototype, an experiment is carried out, simul ating a self-construction of space structures with IVGTs in a null gra vity space.