A GROUND FACILITY TO TEST GNC ALGORITHMS AND SENSORS FOR AUTONOMOUS RENDEZVOUS AND DOCKING

This paper presents the project of a GNC system for a ground test-bed rendezvous and docking demonstrator for ground operations and the related rendezvous and docking (RV&D) simulator application, developed within the STEPS regional project (Systems and Technologies for Space Exploration). The test-bed system is a flat floor where two scaled vehicles, one active chaser and one "semi-active" target, can perform rendezvous and docking maneuvers floating on the plane with pierced plates as lifting systems. The GNC system is designed to work both with inertial and non-inertial reference frame systems, receiving signals from various navigation sensors (including a vision system) and combining them with a Kalman filter. A PID control law and PW modulators are used to command the cold gas thrusters of the chaser, and to follow an assigned trajectory with its specified velocity profile. The design of the GNC and its architecture will be detailed in the paper, including a performance analysis based on simulated. A complete description of the integrated subsystems will also be presented.