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Formation ying of multiple spacecraft is an enabling technology for many future space science missions. However, the coordination and control of such instruments present many design challenges. This paper addresses the formation ying spacecraft control problem at several levels. We present low-level, multi-vehicle, station keeping algorithms and a control architecture to keep the vehicles align...

In the outer regions of Saturn's main rings, strong tidal forces balance gravitational accretion processes. Thus, unusual phenomena may be expected there. The Cassini spacecraft has recently revealed the strange "flying saucer" shape of two small satellites, Pan and Atlas, located in this region, showing prominent equatorial ridges. The accretion of ring particles onto the equatorial surfaces o...

Electromagnetic (EM) actuators in space applications are not a new idea, but they are most of the time associated to low Earth orbit missions, where the on-board magnetic moment interacts with the Earth magnetic field. More recently EM actuators have been studied in the context of formation flying as a way to generate inter-spacecraft force and torque in order to control the formation geometry ...

The prescribed performance robust control method for the leader/follower (L/F) formation is proposed in this paper to solve problem of spacecraft flying (SFF) full-process (FPC). objective FPC establish an ultra-close with constraint collision avoidance between two spacecraft, and then maintain configuration high-precision accuracy a period time. main contribution lies following three aspects. ...

The attitude coordination control problem for formation flying spacecraft associated with time-varying reference attitude tracking subject to control input saturation is investigated in this paper. According to different cases, three kinds of continuous and bounded coordination controllers are proposed. With the use of hyperbolic tangent functions, a fundamental controller is presented for an i...

Formation control ideas for multiple spacecraft using the virtual structure approach are presented. If there is no formation feedback from the spacecraft to the virtual structure, the spacecraft will get out of formation when the virtual structure moves too fast for the spacecraft to track due to spacecraft control saturation or the total system must sacrifice convergence speed in order to keep...

Formation control for multiple vehicles has become an active research area in recent years. Generally there are three approaches to this problem, namely leaderfollowing, behavioral, and virtual structure approaches. In this paper, formation control ideas for multiple spacecraft using virtual structure approach are presented. If there is no formation feedback from spacecraft to the virtual struc...

In this paper, formation control ideas for multiple spacecraft using the virtual structure approach are presented. If there is no formation feedback from the spacecraft to the virtual structure, the spacecraft will get out of formation when the virtual structure moves too fast for the spacecraft to track due to spacecraft control saturation or the total system must sacrifice convergence speed i...