Angles-only relative navigation in low earth orbit

Rendezvous in orbit has recently regained considerable attention, as it is required to enable on-orbit servicing or active debris removal activities. The pressing need for the realization of suchmissions falls within the more general societal attempt to make human activities more sustainable, avoiding wasting valuable resources and ensuring that...

Neuro-Adaptive Cooperative Tracking Rendezvous of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

This brief proposes a neuro-adaptive method for the unsolved problem of cooperative tracking rendezvous of nonholonomic mobile robots (NMRs) subject to uncertain and unmodelled dynamics. A hierarchical cooperative control framework is proposed, which consists of a novel distributed estimator along with local neuro-adaptive tracking...

Flights are ten a sail - Re-use and commonality in the design and system engineering of small spacecraft solar sail missions with modular hardware for responsive and adaptive exploration

The exploration of small solar system bodies started with fast fly-bys of opportunity on the sidelines of missions to the planets. The tiny new worlds seen turned out to be so intriguing and different from all else (and each other) that dedicated sample-return and in-situ analysis missions were developed and launched. Through these, highly...

Control loops with human operators in space operations: part IV: research requirements for human-in-the-loop space teleoperator development

This report presents a discussion of short-term human engineering research requirements for developing rendezvous and docking and space telemanipulation capabilities. A catalogue of research topics related to human-in-the-loop teleoperation performance is given. This is followed by an overview of available resources for model analytical...

Control loops with human operators in space operations: part V: executive summary

This volume comprises the executive summary of the final report of the study on Control Loops with Human Operators in Space Operations, performed for the European Space Agency (ESA). It summarises the following four volumes: Part I : Human Engineering Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation Techniques (NLR) Part II : Robotics Operations and Manual...

Control loops with human operators in space operations: part III: rendezvous and docking operations and model analysis of performance with human-in-the-loop

This report presents the results of an illustrative analysis of human-in-the-loop rendezvous and docking (RVD) performance, for the purpose of demonstrating the practicality of applying human engineering methods and techniques, introduced in Part I of this project, to the analysis of control loops with human operators in space operations....