Ronan Arraes Jardim Chagas
Since 2013, Ronan Arraes Jardim Chagas has been with the Space Systems Division of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE). As his most significant accomplishment, he was the Mission Architect and the responsible technician of the attitude and orbit control subsystem (AOCS) of the Brazilian Satellite Amazonia-1, successfully launched in February 2021.
He has been working with Control Systems and Signal Processing for 14 years. During this time, he was involved in many projects related to those areas. He successfully embedded Kalman filters (Extended and Unscented) in many autonomous systems and developed state-of-art signal processing algorithms to perform estimation in distributed sensor networks.
He conducts several research projects at INPE. Those projects include artificial intelligence and advanced control techniques applied to the AOCS, space mission design optimization, advanced signal processing, and orbit analysis.
He is also a Julia language enthusiast. He has used it daily since 2013 to perform many activities related to his work. As his most significant project with this language, he developed a complete AOCS simulator to test and verify this subsystem. The simulation achieved outstanding performance and accuracy, given the orbital data collected from the satellite Amazonia-1.
He is the creator and maintainer of some important packages of the Julia language ecosystem: ReferenceFrameRotations.jl, SatelliteToolbox.jl, PrettyTables.jl, and others.
Session
The development of a satellite attitude and orbit control subsystem (AOCS) imposes challenges since the dynamics cannot be reproduced on the ground. The entire process relies on simulation. We developed a novel workflow that improved productivity by using the outstanding adaptability of the Julia language and its ecosystem. We could adapt a validated simulator to test and verify all the AOCS algorithms at each development phase, drastically reducing error propagation and, consequently, test cost