Related papers: Autonomous and Robust Orbit-keeping for Small Body…

This paper considers the prescribed performance control (PPC) of spacecraft attitude tracking under multiple physical constraints, focusing on the robust issues. A novel Barrier Lyapunov function is proposed to realize the…

Orbital debris is a nonlinear control problem in a stratified orbital environment, not a static inventory. This paper develops a reduced-order shell-and-size framework that connects collision-rate scaling, fragment-production gain, natural…

To improve our understanding of orbital instabilities in compact planetary systems, we compare suites of $N$-body simulations against numerical integrations of simplified dynamical models. We show that, surprisingly, dynamical models that…

Almost-global orientation trajectory tracking for a rigid body with external actuation has been well studied in the literature, and in the geometric setting as well. The tracking control law relies on the fact that a rigid body is a simple…

This paper presents a trajectory optimization and control approach for the guidance of an orbital four-arm robot in extravehicular activities. The robot operates near the target spacecraft, enabling its arm's end-effectors to reach the…

The growing interest in space activities has led to the emergence of new space operators and innovative mission concepts. Small satellites such as CubeSats reduce mission costs and are typically deployed in constellations or formation…

This paper presents a robust path-planning framework for safe spacecraft autonomy under uncertainty and develops a computationally tractable formulation based on convex programming. We utilize chance-constrained control to formulate the…

In this paper we study the controlled motion of an arbitrary two-dimensional body in an ideal fluid with a moving internal mass and an internal rotor in the presence of constant circulation around the body. We show that by changing the…

Small free-flying spacecraft can provide vital extravehicular activity (EVA) services like inspection and repair for future orbital outposts like the Lunar Gateway. Operating adjacent to delicate space station and microgravity targets,…

Due to the complexity and inconstancy of the space environment, accurate mathematical models for spacecraft rendezvous are difficult to obtain, which consequently complicates the control tasks. In this paper, a linearized time-variant plant…

We consider a single non-holonomic Dubins-like robot traveling with a constant longitudinal speed in an a priori unknown and unsteady planar environment. The robot should detect, locate, and track the boundary of a dynamic environmental…

In the real-world, self-driving vehicles are required to achieve steering maneuvers in both uncontrolled and uncertain environments while maintaining high levels of safety and passengers' comfort. Ignoring these requirements would…

This paper considers the coupled orbit and attitude dynamics of a dumbbell spacecraft around an asteroid. Geometric methods are used to derive the coupled equations of motion, defined on the configuration space of the special Euclidean…

This paper presents a strategy for control of a spacecraft docking with a non-maneuvering target in the presence of safety constraints and bounded disturbances. The presence of disturbances prevents convergence to a unique docking state, so…

A control optimization approach is presented for a chaser spacecraft tasked with maintaining proximity to a target space object while avoiding collisions. The target object trajectory is provided numerically to account for both passive…

In this letter, we investigate the formation control problem of mobile robots moving in the plane where, instead of assuming robots to be simple points, each robot is assumed to have the form of a disk with equal radius. Based on interior…

This paper presents a novel fuel-optimal guidance and control methodology for spacecraft swarm reconfiguration in Restricted Multi-Body Problems (RMBPs) with a guarantee of passive safety, maintaining miss distance even under abrupt loss of…

In-Orbit Servicing and Active Debris Removal require advanced robotic capabilities for capturing and detumbling uncooperative targets. This work presents a hierarchical control framework for autonomous robotic capture of tumbling objects in…

We are interested in stable periodic orbits for spacecrafts in the gravitational field of minor celestial bodies. The stable periodic orbits around minor celestial bodies are useful not only for the mission design of the deep space…

This work proposes a safety-critical local reactive controller that enables the robot to navigate in unknown and cluttered environments. In particular, the trajectory tracking task is formulated as a constrained polynomial optimization…