KISS Post-doctoral Fellowship Final Report

This paper considers motion planning for small (e.g. cubesat-type) satellites operating within a few meters 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 other constraints such as obstacles. The proposed approach is based on constructing a reduced-order representation 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 2-D experimental testbed consisting of an air-bearing table and two cubesat engineering models is developed for partial testing and integration of the proposed methods.