Autonomous Rendezvous with Non-cooperative Target Objects with Swarm Chasers and Observers

Space debris is on the rise due to the increasing demand for spacecraft for com-munication, navigation, and other applications. The Space Surveillance Network (SSN) tracks over 27,000 large pieces of debris and estimates the number of small, un-trackable fragments at over 1,00,000. To control the growth of debris, the for-mation of further debris must be reduced. Some solutions include deorbiting larger non-cooperative resident space objects (RSOs) or servicing satellites in or-bit. Both require rendezvous with RSOs, and the scale of the problem calls for autonomous missions. This paper introduces the Multipurpose Autonomous Ren-dezvous Vision-Integrated Navigation system (MARVIN) developed and tested at the ORION Facility at Florida Institution of Technology. MARVIN consists of two sub-systems: a machine vision-aided navigation system and an artificial po-tential field (APF) guidance algorithm which work together to command a swarm of chasers to safely rendezvous with the RSO. We present the MARVIN architec-ture and hardware-in-the-loop experiments demonstrating autonomous, collabo-rative swarm satellite operations successfully guiding three drones to rendezvous with a physical mockup of a non-cooperative satellite in motion.

Comments: Presented at AAS/AIAA Spaceflight Mechanics Meeting 2023, 17 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables