Constrained Trajectory Generation for Microsatellite Formation Flying

Mark B. Milam, Nicolas Petit and Richard M. Murray
Submitted, 2001 AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference

Station keeping and reorientation control of a cluster of fully-actuated

 low-thrust micro-satellites is considered in this paper. We address the control 
 problem by taking advantage of the fully-actuated structure of the micro-satellite. 
 We propose a very general open-loop solution by solving in real-time constrained 
 trajectory generation problems for stationkeeping and reorientation. Performance 
 of this methodology is reported for a typical micro-satellite format ion flying 
 space mission using the Nonlinear Trajectory Generation software package.

• Conference

 Paper: http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/preprints/mpm01-gnc.pdf

• Project(s): Template:HTDB funding::AFOSR