ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

In the past decade, GMV has been, both as a participant and a reviewer, at the forefront of ESA?s efforts in identifying and responding to criticalities in GNC technologies for future ADR and in-orbit servicing missions. This paper provides an anthology of the recent developments - the state of the art of ADR mission design from a GNC perspective, informed from GMV's recent experience in the topic. In addition to outlining some of the main challenges and describing the state-of-the-art of GNC responses, it outlines consolidated methodologies for design, development, verification and validation to advance of their readiness. The know-how to inform GMV?s critical assessment was acquired in mission development activities, from flagship initiatives to large targets to CubeSat in-orbit demonstrators; as well technological development programmes for specific elements, in particular, lessons learnt from GMV?s predominant role in Mission Analysis and GNC design of ESA?s e.Deorbit, RACE, MSRN, ORCO, COMRADE, DETUMBLING, COBRA, MSR-DD , D4R and ANDROID. Some of GNC Critical Aspects within ADR missions covered are: concepts of operations; guidance - angular synchronization, passive safety trajectory planning; control ? coupled, compliant and combined control, 6 DOF force motion control during synchronization phases, visual servoing and compliant 10+DoF control during reach, phase rate damping; multi-spectral / camera-only-based navigation.