This paper considers motion planning for small satellites such as CubeSats performing proximity operations in a several meters range of a target object. The main goal is to develop a principled methodology for handling the coupled effects of orbital dynamics, rotational and translational rigid-body dynamics, underactuation and control bounds, and obstacle avoidance constraints. The proposed approach is based on constructing a reduced-order parameterization of the dynamics through dynamics inversion and differential flatness, and on efficient global optimization over a finite-dimensional reduced representation. Two simulated scenarios, a satellite reconfiguration maneuver and asteroid surface sampling, are developed to illustrate the approach. In addition, a simple two-dimensional experimental testbed consisting of an air-bearing table and two CubeSat engineering models is developed for partial testing and integration of the proposed methods.


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    Title :

    Trajectory Planning for CubeSat Short-Time-Scale Proximity Operations


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2014-03-01




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





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