SCOUT Inc., a space tech company developing autonomous proximity operations and spacecraft awareness service, today announced its selection for a NASA SBIR award to make relative navigation more resilient and enable more autonomous rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking. This effort is expected to yield advancements in autonomy and resilience across a wide range of NASA applications which often require exhaustive pre-planning and manual operations of multi-satellite systems.
SCOUT’s fault-tolerant and robust 6-degree-of-freedom finite-time controllers integrate multiple control system inputs and data sources, such as SCOUT-Vision remote sensing systems, to facilitate faster, more accurate tracking performance and more efficient control energy consumption during proximity operations than conventional controller modes in the presence of real-world challenges such as actuator faults, parametric uncertainty, and unknown external disturbances.
“Autonomous relative navigation is a key-enabling technology for myriad space missions: space debris management, supplying the International Space Station, conducting on-orbit satellite maintenance and assembly, and inter-satellite networking. More persistent, robust, fault-resilient relative navigation integrating precise, remote state and attitude estimation is a game-changer,” stated Sergio Gallucci, Co-founder and CTO of SCOUT. “We’re excited to have NASA’s support; this award will enable allocation of additional resources to crucial real-time navigation systems to support our mission.”
“RPO and science mission planning is time-consuming and scheduling-intensive with lacking real-time data: proximity operations are highly prone to abort maneuvers due to state measurement deviation or false-positive conjunction data messages,” added Dr. Daero Lee, Senior Guidance, Navigation, and Control Engineer at SCOUT. “We’re developing real-time orbit determination systems that integrate on-board GPS signal measurement and analysis to achieve more persistent navigation.”
The commercial space industry is a significant potential non-NASA beneficiary of this research and development. Orbital servicing and logistics end-users lack closed-loop, persistent, robust control for rendezvous and proximity operations: this has led to SCOUT’s on-board navigation capabilities being adopted by Orbit Fab, Momentus, and are being considered by several additional commercial and Defense users.
