A new laboratory test bed is introduced that enables the hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the autonomous approach and docking of a chaser spacecraft to a target spacecraft of similar mass. The test bed consists of a chaser spacecraft and a target spacecraft simulator floating via air pads on a flat floor. The prototype docking interface mechanism of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agen...

An adaptive control algorithm for the spacecraft attitude tracking problem when the spin axis directions and/or the gains of the flywheel actuators are uncertain is developed. A smooth projection algorithm is applied to keep the parameter estimates inside a singularityfree region and avoid parameter bursting. Numerical examples show that the controller successfully deals with unknown misalignme...

Attitude control law design for spacecraft large angle maneuvers is investigated in this paper. The feedback linearization technique is applied to the design of a nonlinear tracking control law. The output function to be tracked is the quaternion attitude parameter. The designed control law turns out to be a combination of attitude and attitude rate tracking command. The attitude-only output fu...

We provide stabilizing feedback control laws for the kinematic system of an underactuated axisymmetric spacecraft subject to input constraints. The proposed control law forces all closed-loop trajectories in a region of the state space where the control inputs are small and bounded. The control law is subsequently extended to solve the case of attitude tracking for an underactuated spacecraft u...

The orientation of a satellite in space described relative to some other object or system is known as the attitude of the satellite. The attitude may be changing with time. To be able to control the attitude of the satellite, it must be equipped with actuators that can produce the required torque. Control Moment Gyroscope is a space craft control actuator which acts as torque amplifier. It is s...

In this paper, an explicit model predictive controller for the attitude of a satellite is designed. Explicit solutions to constrained linear MPC problems can be computed by solving multi-parametric quadratic programs (mpQP), where the parameters are the components of the state vector. The solution to the mpQP is a piecewise affine (PWA) function, which can be evaluated at each sample to obtain ...

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In this paper, an adaptive backstepping technique based fault tolerant control scheme is developed for a spacecraft attitude stabilization system, in which the external disturbances and partial loss of actuator effectiveness fault are considered. More specifically, using the adaptive backstepping control method, a baseline control law is first proposed for the normal system without actuator fau...

This paper investigates the velocity-free feedback control problem associated with finite time attitude stabilization of a rigid spacecraft subject to external disturbance and input saturation. First of all, to address the lack of angular velocity measurement, a novel, fast, finite time convergent observer is proposed to recover the unknown angular velocity information in a finite time under ex...