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Theses/Dissertations

Air Force Institute of Technology

Aerospace Engineering

2021

Rendezvous and proximity operations

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Autonomous Mission Planning For Spacecraft Rendezvous And Proximity Operations, Julia C. Bell Jun 2021

Autonomous Mission Planning For Spacecraft Rendezvous And Proximity Operations, Julia C. Bell

Theses and Dissertations

The evolving space environment has created a demand for autonomous spacecraft that can maneuver in complex and sometimes contentious environments. Constraint enforcement, such as an avoidance zone to prevent collision with a target, is a key component of autonomous control to ensure safety and performance requirements are met. Finite-horizon Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control method due to its improved computation time while optimizing performance. Two areas of MPC in need of expansion are time-varying constraints and phase transitions in multi-phase applications. In this work, MPC is employed to track the reference trajectory of a multi-phase satellite inspection …


Safe Spacecraft Rendezvous And Proximity Operations Via Reachability Analysis, Paul A. Grossi Mar 2021

Safe Spacecraft Rendezvous And Proximity Operations Via Reachability Analysis, Paul A. Grossi

Theses and Dissertations

The rapid expansion of the utilization of space by nations and industry has presented new challenges and opportunities to operate efficiently and responsibly. Reachability analysis is the process of computing the set of states that can be reached given all admissible controls and can be a valuable component in an autonomous mission planning system if conducted efficiently. In the current research, reachability analysis is used with several relative motion models to show that all ranges of orbits can be computed in milliseconds, and that it is a feasible approach for on-board autonomous mission planning. Reachability analysis is then combined with …