Trajectory Planning for CubeSat Short-Time-Scale Proximity Operations

This paper considers motion planning for small satellites such as CubeSats performing proximity operations in a several meters range of a target object. The main goal is to develop a principled methodology for handling the coupled effects of orbital dynamics, rotational and translational rigid-body dynamics, underactuation and control bounds, and obstacle avoidance constraints. The proposed approach is based on constructing a reduced-order parameterization of the dynamics through dynamics inversion and differential flatness, and on efficient global optimization over a finite-dimensional reduced representation. Two simulated scenarios, a satellite reconfiguration maneuver and asteroid surface sampling, are developed to illustrate the approach. In addition, a simple two-dimensional experimental testbed consisting of an air-bearing table and two CubeSat engineering models is developed for partial testing and integration of the proposed methods.