Distributed Collision Free Trajectory Optimization for the Reconfiguration of a Spacecraft Formation

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in formation flying with many lightweight spacecraft, as satellite missions can potentially become cheaper and more flexible. An example of such mission is the Silicon Wafer Integrated Femtosatellites mission, consisting of 100 to 1000 spacecraft with a mass of 0.1 kg. Due to modest control...

A Hybrid Optimal Control Approach to Multi-Aircraft Formation Flying

A Hybrid Optimal Control (HOC) framework which can be used in conjunction with existing optimal control software is presented. By using hybrid optimal control theory, trajectory optimization problems for systems that are both discrete time and continuous time from a mathematical perspective can be solved. A case study on multi-aircraft formation...