Nebula Public Library

Classical control design techniques used for flexible spacecraft are based on single axis design approaches to control the rigid-body motion complemented by low-pass and notch filters to suppress the resonant peaks of the low-frequency flexible modes. These techniques are inherently relying on a priori knowledge of the structural flexible modes and introduce significant conservatism in the control and structural design, dictated by the need to separate the controller bandwidth from the flexible modes frequency.

Early space missions consisted of bespoke components communicating with facilities on Earth. Today this model has been updated with off-the-shelf components and reusable launch systems that lower mission cost into low-Earth orbit. Extending this model to develop a sustainable off-Earth economy requires bringing the concept of reconfigurable computing agents to deep space.

Future spacecraft missions require high accuracy (in relative and absolute kinematics as well as attitude parameters).

Space missions benefit greatly by the capability of the on-board GNC system to adapt rapidly to unknown environment. Autonomous vision-based navigation is a particular technology under implementation in several ESA missions. One of the most interesting applications in that field is the proximity operations around a small asteroid, like those in HERA.
The goal of this activity was to develop a navigation algorithm with the capability to fly over an unknown terrain and achieve better navigation performances than current vision-based techniques based on unknown feature tracking.