The capture and recovery of an expensive satellite that has lost its attitude control function can be an important class of future missions for space robots. Moreover, there are tens of thousands of pieces of debris in orbit from previous missions. These orbiting debris such as the uncontrolled pieces of booster stages and obsolete satellites are a serious hazard to future orbiting spacecrafts....

Some interesting aspects of motion and control for systems such as those found in biological and robotic locomotion, attitude control of spacecraft and underwater vehicles, and steering of cars and trailers, involve geometric concepts. When an animal or a robot moves its joints in a periodic fashion, it can move forward or rotate in place. When the amplitude of the motion increases, the resulti...

The attitude dynamics of a satellite with a large magnetic residual dipole is analysed and the effect of perturbations of the orbital parameters on stability is discussed. The analysis is the basis for the design of an attitude control strategy that minimizes the required control torque while satisfying an absolute pointing error constraint whenever direct compensation of magnetic torque is not...

Some interesting aspects of motion and control for systems such as those found in biological and robotic locomotion, attitude control of spacecraft and underwater vehicles, and steering of cars and trailers, involve geometric concepts. When an animal or a robot moves its joints in a periodic fashion, it can move forward or rotate in place. When the amplitude of the motion increases, the resulti...

Small satellites are now capable of performing missions that require accurate attitude determination and control. However, low size, power, and cost requirements limit the types of attitude sensors that can be used on a small craft, making attitude estimation difficult. In particular, star trackers—often the attitude sensors of choice for larger spacecraft—are not practical for small satellites...

Abstract—This paper presents the effect of the orbit inclination on the pointing error of the satellite antenna and consequently on its footprint on earth for a typical Kuband payload system. The performance assessment is examined using both analytical simulations and practical measurements, taking into account all the additional sources of the pointing errors, such as East-West station keeping...

This paper presents a novel and generic reactionless visual servo controller for a satellite-based multi-arm space robot. The controller is designed to complete the task of visually servoing the robot’s end-effectors to a desired pose, while maintaining minimum attitude disturbance on the base-satellite. Task function approach is utilized to coordinate the servoing process and attitude of the b...

Most satellite remote-sensing images are obtained using pushbroom or whiskbroom scans by the coupling of line scans in one dimension and satellite movements in another dimension. Since satellite imagery should be consistent with maps when used as geospatial data, good geometric performance is a challenge for satellite data processing (Lee et al., 2004; Storey et al., 2004). Accurate attitude es...