Related papers: Autonomous Navigation and Station-Keeping on Near-…
We present an algorithm to perform fuel-optimal stationkeeping for spacecraft in unstable halo orbits with additional constraints to ensure safety in the event of a control failure. We formulate a convex trajectory-optimization problem to…
We present an optimization-based approach for fuel-efficient spacecraft rendezvous to the Gateway, a space station that will be deployed on a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon. The approach: i) ensures passive safety and…
Small body exploration is a pertinent challenge due to low gravity environments and strong sensitivity to perturbations like Solar Radiation Pressure (SRP). Thus, autonomous methods are being developed to enable safe navigation and control…
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…
The paper deals with the design of an improved model predictive control scheme for achieving station-keeping in a quasi Halo orbit around the $L_2$ point in the Earth-Moon system. The improvement is obtained thanks to a multi-rate…
This paper demonstrates a novel guidance and control strategy for cislunar near-rectilinear halo orbit formation-keeping applied to high-fidelity dynamics. Bounded relative motion is constructed about long-duration ephemeris trajectories…
Near-rectilinear halo orbits (NRHOs) around Earth-Moon L2 in the Circular Restricted 3-Body Problem (CR3BP) exhibit a complex dynamical landscape, featuring a band of normally elliptic orbits embedded within regions of strong instability.…
The continued exploration of Mars will require a greater number of in-space assets to aid interplanetary communications. Future missions to the surface of Mars may be augmented with stationary satellites that remain overhead at all times as…
Areostationary Mars orbit (AMO) satellites will play an important role in future expeditions to the Martian surface due to their strength as navigation and communication satellites. Perturbative forces experienced by an AMOR satellite will…
Direct imaging of exoplanets allows us to measure positions and chemical signatures of exoplanets. Given the limited resources for space observations where the atmosphere is absent, we want to make these measurements from the ground.…
This paper presents a navigation strategy to fly to the Moon along a Weak Stability Boundary transfer trajectory. A particular strategy is devised to ensure capture into an uncontrolled relatively stable orbit at the Moon. Both uncertainty…
We present a novel outdoor navigation algorithm to generate stable and efficient actions to navigate a robot to reach a goal. We use a multi-stage training pipeline and show that our approach produces policies that result in stable and…
This article proposes a visual inertial navigation algorithm intended to diminish the horizontal position drift experienced by autonomous fixed wing UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles) in the absence of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System)…
This work presents an Online Supervised Training (OST) method to enable robust vision-based navigation about a non-cooperative spacecraft. Spaceborne Neural Networks (NN) are susceptible to domain gap as they are primarily trained with…
Extremely-Low Lunar Orbits (eLLOs) (altitudes $\leq 50$ km) exhibit severe perturbations due to the highly non-spherical lunar gravitational field, presenting unique challenges to orbit maintenance. These altitudes are too low for the…
This article proposes an inertial navigation algorithm intended to lower the negative consequences of the absence of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals on the navigation of autonomous fixed wing low SWaP (Size, Weight, and…
Odometry in adverse weather conditions, such as fog, rain, and snow, presents significant challenges, as traditional vision and LiDAR-based methods often suffer from degraded performance. Radar-Inertial Odometry (RIO) has emerged as a…
The search for exoplanets is pushing adaptive optics systems on ground-based telescopes to their limits. Currently, we are limited by two sources of noise: the temporal control error and non-common path aberrations. First, the temporal…
The increasing interest in spacecraft autonomy and the complex tasks to be accomplished by the spacecraft raise the need for a trustworthy approach to perform Verification & Validation of Guidance, Navigation, and Control algorithms. In the…
Observability of the target, safety, and robustness are often recognized as critical factors in ensuring successful far-range proximity operations. The application of angles-only (AO) navigation for proximity operations is often met with…