Spacecraft attitude estimation and control

The challenge

Almost all existing spacecraft attitude estimation and control algorithms are based on linear dynamics. The algorithms introduces the practical hard limitations in the spacecraft attitude manoeuvre and thereby the nature of missions to be accomplished. Unified framework for designing robust and yet optimal algorithms for fast attitude reorientation or tracking manoeuvre is still an important open problem.

How it is solved / purpose of research

Our approaches are inspired by biological systems, which are processing massive measurements in real-time. Many researchers have suggested non-linear control and estimation algorithms. Because of the large amount of data to be processed and the computational high demand, however, the real-time applications were not very successful and most of previous work has been focused on how to reduce the required calculations. In our approach, we take a rather different direction, i.e. maximising the amount of data to be fused by using the parallel processing capability.

Why it is important / what difference will it make (Impact)

It is quite noticeable that whenever we watch space mission, all movements are extremely slow unlike the ones in scientific fiction movies. Unless we solve these issues from the inherent non-linearities in spacecraft dynamics, all future space mission would be stuck in the current limitation. We are at the right time to almost solve these problems using the computational power, which has been increasing exponentially fast for the last decades.

Lead researcher: Jongrae Kim