Flight-Like Ground Demonstrations of Precision Maneuvers for Spacecraft Formations

Terrestrial planet finder interferometer: 2006-2007 progress and plans

“…In 2007 the Formation Control Testbed demonstrated its milestone for precision maneuvers using two robots, showing autonomous initialization, maneuvering, and operation in a collision free manner. 5,6 The key maneuver that was demonstrated was representative of TPF-I science observations. Repeated experiments with the robots demonstrated formation rotations through greater than 90 degrees at ten times the flight rotation rate while maintaining a relative position control to 5 cm rms.…”

“…3,4 • Completion of Milestone #2: a demonstration of precision formation maneuvers in a ground-based robotic testbed, with performance traceability to flight. 5,6 • The demonstration of nulling over a 32% bandwidth centered at a wavelength of 10 µm at a level of 1.1 × 10 −5 using the Adaptive Nuller. 4 • An increased emphasis on the design of a reduced-scope mission.…”

Design and Research of a Microgravity Floating Target Satellite System

“…This system can simulate the motion in two direction and rotation around three orthogonal axis. NASA JPL is developing a simulation system [13,14] named formation control testbed(FCT). The FCT system has five degree of freedom and up to now it is the most advanced simulation system.…”

Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation for Spacecraft Formation Flying

“…This results in stringent requirements on control algorithms and measurement systems. Several control strategies have been developed for spacecraft formation flying, for example, LQR [1], decentralized control [2], intelligent control [3], Fuzzy control [4], adaptive control [5][6][7], synchronization control [8][9][10], and so forth.…”

“…Once a controller is developed for formation flying mission, it must be verified in order to apply it. One approach is to conduct hardware experiments, for example, TPF mission experiments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) [10]. However, this kind of hardware experiment is extremely expensive and time consuming.…”