Research into the autonomy of spacecraft has been of increasing interest. Indeed, with a growing debris population, robots that can perform routine tasks autonomously (such as simple repairs/maintenance, refueling, or debris removal) may become increasingly essential for actively preventing disaster. In this context, several autonomous missions to uncooperative targets (which in general can be tumbling and orbiting the Earth elliptically) will require rendezvous and docking procedures. In this project, I'm working on designing a Control Scheme for a Thrust vectoring Satellite using Koopman based approach for it to rendezvous with a tumbling noncooperative Satellite, under the guidance of Dr. Debasish Ghose, a professor of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
Simulation.Video.mp4
Note: The above video depicts a rendezvous of the spacecraft with the target satellite moving in an elliptical orbit. It has been assumed that the chaser satellite possesses the knowledge of the trajectory of the target satellite. This simulation is performed at an early stage of the project. The model will be upgraded as the project progresses. The plot at the end of the video shows the errors in relative position and velocity in the LVLH frame.