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 (11 pages, PDF, 323K)
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