Related papers: Autonomous Horizon-based Asteroid Navigation With …
This paper presents an adaptive observer-based navigation strategy for spacecraft in Circular Relative Orbit (CRO) scenarios, addressing challenges in proximity operations like formation flight and uncooperative target inspection. The…
This study investigates the application of modern control theory to improve the precision of spacecraft orbit maneuvers in low Earth orbit under the influence of solar radiation pressure. A full order observer based feedback control…
This paper investigates the infinite horizon optimal control problem (OCP) for space applications characterized by nonlinear dynamics. The proposed approach divides the problem into a finite horizon OCP with a regularized terminal cost,…
This article presents a path-following control law for autonomous orbital maintenance of small body missions. The control law is robust, stable, and capable of controlling only the orbital geometry, allowing the spacecraft to operate with…
This work presents a real-time autonomous track navigation framework for nonholonomic differential-drive mobile robots by jointly integrating multi-task visual perception and a provably stable tracking controller. The perception pipeline…
This article develops an optical navigation (OPNAV) and station-keeping pipeline for the near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) in high-fidelity ephemeris model dynamics, using synthetic images of the Moon in a non-iterative horizon-based OPNAV…
The spacecraft attitude tracking problem is addressed with actuator faults and uncertainties among inertias, external disturbances, and, in particular, state estimates. A continuous sliding mode attitude controller is designed using…
This paper presents a vision guidance and control method for autonomous robotic capture and stabilization of orbital objects in a time-critical manner. The method takes into account various operational and physical constraints, including…
We study the nonlinear observability of a systems states in view of how well they are observable and what control inputs would improve the convergence of their estimates. We use these insights to develop an observability-aware…
Control of systems operating in unexplored environments is challenging due to lack of complete model knowledge. Additionally, under measurement noises, data collected from onboard sensors are of limited accuracy. This paper considers…
This paper presents a new algorithm for autonomous multitarget tracking of resident space objects using optical angles-only measurements from a spaceborne observer. To enable autonomous angles-only navigation of spacecraft swarms, an…
In this paper, the trajectory planning problem for autonomous rendezvous and docking between a controlled spacecraft and a tumbling target is addressed. The use of a variable planning horizon is proposed in order to construct an appropriate…
A new era of space exploration and exploitation is fast approaching. A multitude of spacecraft will flow in the future decades under the propulsive momentum of the new space economy. Yet, the flourishing proliferation of deep-space assets…
This paper investigates an autonomous navigation method for spacecraft operating in the outer solar system, up to 250 AU from the Sun, using the parallactic shifts of nearby stars. These measurements enable estimation of the spacecraft…
Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have resulted in their quick adoption for wide a range of civilian applications, including precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring and surveillance. UAVs offer low-cost…
Space debris and inactive satellites pose a threat to the safety and integrity of operational spacecraft and motivate the need for space situational awareness techniques. These uncooperative targets create a challenging tracking and…
In order to understand the appropriate field of view (FOV) size of celestial automatic navigation systems for surface ships, we investigate the variations of measurement accuracy of star position and probability of successful star…
We propose AstroSLAM, a standalone vision-based solution for autonomous online navigation around an unknown target small celestial body. AstroSLAM is predicated on the formulation of the SLAM problem as an incrementally growing factor…
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…
Real world visual navigation requires robots to operate in unfamiliar, human-occupied dynamic environments. Navigation around humans is especially difficult because it requires anticipating their future motion, which can be quite…