The paper discusses the coupled attitude-orbit dynamics and control of an electric-sail-based spacecraft in a heliocentric transfer mission. The mathematical model characterizing the propulsive thrust is first described as a function of the orbital radius and the sail angle. Since the solar wind dynamic pressure acceleration is induced by the sail attitude, the orbital and attitude dynamics of ...

The paper outlines orbit and attitude control problems of a long-distance two-satellite drag-free formation for the Earth gravity monitoring. Modeling and control design follows the Embedded Model Control and shows how disturbance dynamics and rejection are mandatory. Orbit and attitude control can be treated separately except in the thrust dispatching law of the all-propulsion actuation. Orbit...

Efficiency and reliability are key issues when a star sensor operates in tracking mode. In the case of high attitude dynamics, the performance of existing attitude tracking algorithms degenerates rapidly. In this paper an extended Kalman filtering-based attitude tracking algorithm is presented. The star sensor is modeled as a nonlinear stochastic system with the state estimate providing the thr...

In a continuous opinion dynamics model using a bounded confidence assumption, individuals can only influence each other’s opinions when those opinions are sufficiently close. However, we often observe real-world cases in which opinions are very different, yet individuals feel compelled to change their ideas to conform with their peers or superiors (or in rare cases, are willing to change them v...

Attitude control systems naturally evolve on nonlinear configurations, such as S and SO(3). The nontrivial topological properties of these configurations result in interesting and complicated nonlinear dynamics when studying the corresponding closed loop attitude control systems. In this paper, we review some global analysis and simulation techniques that allow us to describe the global nonline...

Control problem of a spacecraft is an important topic in automatic control engineering. A body orbiting the Earth in geosynchronous orbit has instabilities in attitude dynamics and disturbances caused by the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and other bodies in space. These effects force the body to lose initial orbit and attitude. Here the control system takes important part of spacecraft missions wher...

This paper examines an optimal spacecraft attitude control problem in the presence of complicated attitude forbidden and mandatary zones. The objective is to design an optimal reorientation trajectory for a rigid body spacecraft under constraints, which is originally formulated as a nonlinear programming problem. The attitude forbidden zones are considered to prevent the light-sensitive instrum...

Pluralistic ignorance, a well-documented socio-psychological conformity phenomenon, involves discrepancies between private attitude and public opinion in certain social contexts. However, continuous opinion dynamics models based on a bounded confidence assumption fail to accurately model pluralistic ignorance because they do not address scenarios in which non-conformists do not need to worry ab...

This paper investigates the problem of synchronizing the chaotic attitude dynamics of multiple spacecraft is investigated based on the distributed predictive control approach. Kinematic and dynamic equations are used to describe the spacecraft system according to the Modified Rodriguez Parameters representation. The respective method follows the sequential and cooperative structure of distribut...

In this paper, we describe a novel approach to automatically detecting and tracking discussion dynamics in Internet social media by focusing on attitude modeling of topics. We characterize each participant’s attitude towards topics as Topical Positioning, employ Topical Positioning Map to represent the positions of participants with respect to each other and track attitude shifts over time. We ...