VSCL graduate student Cassie-Kay McQuinn presented “Run Time Assurance for Simultaneous Constraint Satisfaction During Spacecraft Attitude Maneuvering” at the 2024 IEEE Aerospace Conference this month. This work was completed as part of her internship with AFRL in summer 2023.
A fundamental capability for On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM) is inspection of the vehicle to be serviced, or the structure being assembled. The focus of this research is developing Active-Set Invariance Filtering (ASIF) Run Time Assurance (RTA) filters that monitor system behavior and the output of the primary controller to enforce attitude requirements pertinent for autonomous space operations. Slack variables are introduced into the ASIF controller to prioritize safety constraints when a solution to all safety constraints is infeasible. Monte Carlo simulation results as well as plots of example cases are shown and evaluated for a three degree of freedom spacecraft with reaction wheel attitude control. A preprint of the paper is available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14723