New application-focused results have now been published regarding application of SMGO to control design of spacecraft. In this paper, we tackled the concurrent design (co-design) of magnetic-based passive attitude compensation, and reaction wheel-based active attitude control for a 3U CubeSat, to attain a minimum tracking error, while satisfying mission-level constraints. Because of the non-trivial interactions of the CubeSat with the space environment, the design of these spacecraft components can only be performed in conjunction with simulation-based experiments. In our statistical results, we have found out that a black-box optimization-based design performed the best compared to other commonly-used engineering design approaches.

The paper Simultaneous design of passive and active spacecraft attitude control using black-box optimization is available here as published in the journal Control Engineering Practice, and is free to everyone to read (using this link) until 18 May 2023.