New Guidance, Navigation, and Control Technologies for Formation Flying Spacecraft and Planetary Landing

This chapter describes recent advancements in the areas of guidance, navigation, and control of distributed spacecraft systems or spacecraft formation flying of swarms of 100-gram class spacecraft and planetary landing. A review of advances in perception technologies for on-board hazard detection and terrain relative navigation is presented. The second part of this chapter is devoted to the discussion of innovative research on spacecraft swarms. Spacecraft swarms, comprised of hundreds to thousands of small spacecraft will push the frontier of the existing formation flying concepts by maximizing the benefits of distributed spacecraft systems. Novel control strategies of handling such a large spacecraft network are presented by employing synchronization control on adaptive graphs and probabilistic swarm guidance strategies. Furthermore, new filtering techniques that enable tracking of a large number of space objects are discussed.