This letter presents a compliant feedback controller of an arm-equipped spacecraft, which does not enforce requirements on the spacecraft position and attitude. The is applicable to pre-contact, contact, post-contact phases robotic operation. In contrast conventional floating-base strategies, eliminates instability system during steady thus can be used in realistic applications. uses external-i...

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...

Structural flexibility in spacecraft can degrade the accuracy of the attitude control system. With this motivation in mind, we compare the performance of inertia-free attitude control laws for a spacecraft with an undamped discrete flexible mode and demonstrate robustness with respect to unmodeled spacecraft dynamics and actuator saturation. First the equations of motion are derived using Lagra...

Air-bearing-based spacecraft simulators are widely used to develop and verify spacecraft control techniques required by modern spacecraft applications. To create a spacelike environment with ground spacecraft simulators, the effects of gravity should be minimized. For a spherical air-bearing system with 3 rotational degrees of freedom, the center of rotation of the spacecraft simulator should b...

There is a substantial amount of literature within the field of spacecraft control which deals with the separate issues of position and attitude control; comparatively little work has been carried out on the joint nonlinear problem of spacecraft position and attitude control. (R.Pongvthithum etal 2005, H.Wong etal 2001, S.M.Veres etal 2002) provide control solutions for spacecraft position cont...

In this paper we describe a new experimental facility at the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech that will allow realistic testing of spacecraft autonomous rendezvous and docking (ARD) maneuvers. The previous 3-DOF Integrated Attitude Control System (IACS) was modified and upgraded to a new 5-DOF Spacecraft Simulator for Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking (SSARD) facility by adding t...

Complete attitude control of a spacecraft is not possible with only one single-gimbal variable-speed control moment gyro due to the conservation of angular momentum. However, partial attitude control without violating the angular momentum conservation principle is still possible. In this paper feedback controllers using only one singlegimbal variable-speed controlmoment gyro are presented that ...

The subject of this research is to study the use of internal moving masses as the primary means of attitude control for a small satellite platform. The goal of this research is to validate the dynamic model formulated in [1] which describes the under-actuated rotational dynamics of a 3U cubesat with two internal orthogonal linearly translating masses. Models have been developed to simulate angu...

The ground-based spacecraft simulator is a useful tool to develop and verify new control laws required by modern spacecraft applications. In order to simulate the space environment with the ground-based spacecraft simulator, the effects of gravity should be minimized. In this paper, a three-axis rotational rigid spacecraft simulator on a spherical air-bearing system is considered. The method of...