ADVANCED GNC TECHNIQUES FOR AUTONOMOUS RENDEZVOUS PROXIMITY OPERATIONS AND DOCKING OF SMALL SATELLITES

The spacecraft Rendezvous, Proximity Operations and Docking (RPOD) mission has been actively studied going back to and before the days of the NASA's Gemini program. The proliferation of small satellites with ever greater sensor and computational capability has opened the possibility of robustly performing these operations with small satellites and without the need for human-in-the loop control methodologies. The CubeSat Proximity Operations Demonstration (CPOD) mission will demonstrate rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking with a pair of 3U CubeSats using miniaturized components and sensors. The goal of this mission is to develop small spacecraft technologies with game changing potential and validate these technologies via spaceflight. This paper will present an overview of the RPO GNC subsystem, which employs a semiautonomous approach to performing RPOD operations where human controllers are in the loop only for key phase transitions. Also presented is an advanced hybrid control algorithm for performing RPOD operations fully autonomously, along with high-fidelity simulation results.