Spacecraft autonomous guidance

Davide Costigliola

Ecosmic

Space agencies and major research institutions worldwide are increasingly interested in developing autonomous guidance, navigation, and control systems. Autonomy can help mitigate several issues, like communication delays and on-ground labor overhead, and improve robustness and frequency of space operations. In this talk, I will present different guidance algorithms designed for close proximity operations and rendezvous scenarios. The procedures aim to optimise the impulsive control history to transfer a chaser spacecraft from an initial relative orbit to a target final orbit within a fixed time interval. I will detail the methodology of simplified analytical strategies that leverage the geometric interpretation of a particular set of relative orbital elements. I will also explain the rationale behind the development of different semi-analytical strategies, that stem from the application of optimal control theory to find impulse directions, magnitudes, and application times. I will finally show the results of extensive numerical simulations, that demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methods to address reconfiguration problems.