Related papers: A Mass-optimized Gravity Tractor for Asteroid Defl…
Large light deflection angles are produced in the strong gravitational field regions around neutron stars and black holes. In the case of binary systems, part of the photons emitted from the companion star towards the collapsed object are…
This paper studies the time-optimal path tracking problem for a team of cooperating robotic manipulators carrying an object. Considering the problem for rigidly grasped objects, we show that it can be cast as a convex optimization problem…
The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
The recent growing interest in small solar system bodies such as asteroids and comets for scientific inspection, exploitation of resources, and planetary defense reasons is pushing the development of innovative engineering solutions to…
Our knowledge of the strengths of small bodies in the Solar System is limited by our poor understanding of their internal structures, and this, in turn, clouds our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies. Observations…
Optimal transport induces the Earth Mover's (Wasserstein) distance between probability distributions, a geometric divergence that is relevant to a wide range of problems. Over the last decade, two relaxations of optimal transport have been…
Joint space trajectory optimization under end-effector task constraints leads to a challenging non-convex problem. Thus, a real-time adaptation of prior computed trajectories to perturbation in task constraints often becomes intractable.…
A common problem in physics and engineering is determination of the orientation of an object given its angular velocity. When the direction of the angular velocity changes in time, this is a nontrivial problem involving coupled differential…
Understanding the deflection of light by a massive deflector, as well as the associated gravitational lens phenomena, require the use of the theory of General Relativity. I consider here a classical approach, based on Newton's equation of…
Spacecraft attitude control using only magnetic torques is a periodic time-varying system as the Earth magnetic field in the spacecraft body frame changes periodically while the spacecraft circles around the Earth. The optimal controller…
In this article, we study the problem of selecting a grasping pose on the surface of an object to be manipulated by considering three post-grasp objectives. These objectives include (i) kinematic manipulation capability, (ii) torque effort…
Primer vector theory using averaged dynamics is well suited for optimizing low-thrust, many-revolution spacecraft trajectories, but is difficult to implement in a way that maintains both optimality and computational efficiency. An improved…
We introduce Gravity, another algorithm for gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we explain how our novel idea change parameters to reduce the deep learning model's loss. It has three intuitive hyper-parameters that the best values…
An algorithm to estimate motion from satellite imagery is presented. Dense displacement fields are computed from time-separated images of of significant convective activity using a Bayesian formulation of the motion estimation problem.…
In this paper the problem of gravitational deflection of relativistic charged massive particles in slowly rotating Kerr-Newman black holes is considered. Toward this purpose we have used two methods: Firstly, we have applied the…
In the event of a total loss of thrust, a pilot must identify a reachable landing site and subsequently execute a forced landing. To do so, they must estimate which region on the ground can be reached safely in gliding flight. We call this…
The multiple spacecraft guidance problem for proximity flight in libration point orbit is considered. A nonlinear optimal control problem with continuous-time path constraints enforcing minimum separation between each spacecraft is…
Through multiple, small unmanned probes we can more efficiently capture an asteroid and return it to lunar orbit. The Asteroid Return and Exploration System (ARES) aims to make use of previously tested technology with the application of a…
We investigate the qualitative characteristics of a test particle attracted to an irregular elongated body, modeled as a non-homogeneous straight segment with a variable linear density. By deriving the potential function in closed form, we…