Station-Keeping is an important capability of the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle in a variety of mission , including inspection and repair of undersea pipeline , and surveillance . Station-Keeping control includes two parts : motion estimation and Station-Keeping control system . In this thesis we propose a monocular vision system for determining the motion of an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle . The vehicle is equipped with a down-looking camera , which provides images of the sea-floor . The motion of vehicle is estimated with a feature-based mosaicking method which requires the extraction and the matching of relevant features . We designed a visual servo control system for maintaining the position of vehicle relative to a visual landmark , while maintaining a fixed depth .

The general station-keeping problem is a focal topic when considering any spacecraft mission application. Recent missions are increasingly requiring complex trajectories to satisfy mission requirements, necessitating the need for accurate station-keeping controllers. An ideal controller reliably corrects for spacecraft state error, minimizes the required propellant, and is computationally efficient. To that end, this investigation assesses the effectiveness of several controller formulations in the circular restricted three-body model. Particularly, a spacecraft is positioned in a L₁ southern halo orbit within the Sun-Earth Moon Barycenter system. To prevent the spacecraft from departing the vicinity of this reference halo orbit, the Floquet mode station-keeping approach is introduced and evaluated. While this control strategy generally succeeds in the station-keeping objective, a breakdown in performance is observed proportional to increases in state error. Therefore, a new hybrid controller is developed which leverages Floquet mode and reinforcement learning. The hybrid controller is observed to efficiently determine corrective maneuvers that consistently recover the reference orbit for all evaluated scenarios. A comparative analysis of the performance metrics of both control strategies is conducted, highlighting differences in the rates of success and the expected propellant costs. The performance comparison demonstrates a relative improvement in the ability of the hybrid controller to meet the mission objectives, and suggests the applicability of reinforcement learning to the station-keeping problem.

Pour mener à bien leur mission, les satellites de télécommunications doivent rester à la verticale d'un même point de la Terre, sur une orbite dite géostationnaire, pour laquelle la période de révolution des satellites sur leur orbite est identique à la période de rotation de la Terre sur elle-même. Cependant, à cause des perturbations orbitales, les satellites tendent à s'en éloigner, et il est alors nécessaire de concevoir des stratégies de commande pour les maintenir dans un voisinage de cette position de référence. Du fait de leur grande valeur de poussée, les systèmes à propulsion chimique ont largement été utilisés, mais aujourd'hui les systèmes à propulsion électrique avec leur grande impulsion spécifique sont des alternatives viables pour réduire la masse d'ergols du satellite, et ainsi le coût au lancement, ou allonger la durée de vie du satellite, ce qui permettrait de limiter l'encombrement dans l'espace. Cependant, l'utilisation d'un tel système propulsif induit des contraintes opérationnelles issues en partie du caractère limité de la puissance électrique disponible à bord. Ces contraintes sont difficiles à prendre en compte dans la transcription du problème de maintien à poste en un problème de contrôle optimal à consommation minimale avec contraintes sur l'état et le contrôle. Ce manuscrit propose deux approches pour résoudre ce problème de commande optimale. La première, basée sur le développement et l'exploitation de conditions nécessaires d'optimalité, consiste à découper le problème initial en trois sous-problèmes pour former une méthode de résolution à trois étapes. La première étape permet de résoudre un problème de maintien à poste expurgé des contraintes opérationnelles, tandis que la deuxième, initialisée par le résultat de la première, produit une solution assurant le respect de ces dernières contraintes. La troisième étape permet d'optimiser la valeur des instants d'allumage et d'extinction des propulseurs dans le cadre du formalisme des systèmes à commutation. La seconde approche, dite " directe ", consiste à paramétrer le profil de commande par une fonction binaire et à le discrétiser sur l'horizon temporel de résolution. Les contraintes opérationnelles sont ainsi facilement transcrites en contraintes linéaires en nombres entiers. Après l'intégration numérique de la dynamique, le problème de contrôle optimal se résume à un problème linéaire en nombres entiers. Après la résolution du problème de maintien à poste sur un horizon court d'une semaine, le problème est résolu sur un horizon long d'un an par résolutions successives sur des horizons courts d'une durée de l'ordre de la semaine. Des contraintes de fin d'horizon court doivent alors être ajoutées afin d'assurer la faisabilité de l'enchaînement des problèmes sur l'horizon court constituant le problème sur l'horizon long. / Geostationary spacecraft have to stay above a fixed point of the Earth, on a so-called geostationary Earth orbit. For this orbit, the orbital period of the spacecraft is equal to the rotation period of the Earth. Because of orbital disturbances, spacecraft drift away their station keeping position. It is therefore mandatory to create control strategies in order to make the spacecraft stay in the vicinity of the station keeping position. Due to their high thrust capabilities, chemical thrusters have been widely used. However nowadays electric propulsion based thrusters with their high specific impulse are viable alternative in order to decrease the spacecraft mass or increase its longevity. The use of such a system induce the necessity to handle operational constraints because of the limited on-board power. These operational constraints are difficult to take into account in the mathematical transcription of the station keeping problem in an optimal control problem with control and state constraints. This thesis proposed two techniques in order to solve this optimal control problem. The first one is based on the computation of first order necessary conditions and consists in decomposing the overall problem in three sub-problems, leading to a three-step decomposition method. The first step solves an optimal control problem without the operational constraints. The second steps enforces these operational constraints thanks to dedicated equivalence schemes and the third one optimises the switching times of the control profile thanks to a method borrowed from the switched systems theory. The second proposed method consists in parametrising the on-off control profile with binary functions. After a time discretisation of the station keeping horizons, the operational constraints are easily recast as linear constraints on integer variables, the dynamics is numerically integrated and the station keeping problem is recast as a mixed integer linear programming problem. After the resolution of the problem over a short time horizon of one week, the station keeping problem is solved over a long time horizon of one year. To this end, the long time horizon is split in shorter horizons over which the problem is successively solved. End-of-cycle constraints have been set up in order to ensure the feasibility of the solution one short horizon after another.

Many satellites have an orbit of reference defined according to their mission. The satellites need therefore to navigate as close as possible to their reference orbit. However, due to external forces, the trajectory of a satellite is disturbed and actions need to be taken. For now, the trajectories of the satellites are monitored by the operations of satellites department which gives appropriate instructions of navigation to the satellites. These steps require a certain amount of time and involvement which could be used for other purposes. A solution could be to make the satellites autonomous. The satellites would take their own decisions depending on their trajectory. The navigation control would be therefore much more efficient, precise and quicker. Besides, the autonomous orbit control could be coupled with an avoidance collision risk management. The satellites would decide themselves if an avoidance maneuver needs to be considered. The alerts of collisions would be given by the ground segment. In order to advance in this progress, this internship enables to analyse the feasibility of the implementation of the two concepts by testing them on an experiments satellite. To do so, tests plans were defined, tests procedures were executed and post-treatment tools were developed for analysing the results of the tests. Critical computational cases were considered as well. The tests were executed in real operations conditions. / Många satelliter har en referensbana definierad enligt deras uppdrag. Satelliterna behöver därför navigera så nära deras referensbana som möjligt. På grund av externa krafter störs dock satellitbanan och åtgärder måste vidtas. För närvarande övervakas satellitbanorna av satellitavdelningar på marken vilka ger lämpliga instruktioner för navigering till satelliterna. Dessa steg kräver en tid och engagemang som skulle kunna användas för andra ändamål. En lösning är att göra satelliterna autonoma. Satelliterna skulle då kunna ta sina egna beslut beroende på deras bana. Navigeringskontrollen skulle därför vara mycket mer effektiv, exakt och snabbare. Dessutom kan den autonoma banregleringen kopplas till riskhantering för undvikande av kollision med rymdskrot och andra satelliter. Satelliterna skulle själva avgöra om en undvikande manöver måste övervägas. Varningar om kollisioner skulle ges av marksegmentet. För att gå vidare i denna utveckling analyserar detta arbete genomförbarheten av implementeringen av olika koncept för undanmanövrar genom att testa dem på en experimentsatellit. För att göra detta definierades testplaner, testprocedurer utfördes och efterbehandlingsverktyg utvecklades för analys av testresultaten. Kritiska beräkningsfall togs fram. Testerna utfördes under verkliga driftsförhållanden.

The number of man-made space objects is dramatically growing nowadays. The continuous monitoring and studying of these objects are necessary to keep their number under control and ensure safe space operations. With respect thereto, international guidelines recommend decongesting the most populated space regions from satellites arriving at the end of their operational lifetime by performing post-mission disposal strategies. In general, a satellite is considered to be functional if it is still performing periodic manoeuvres to stay within the orbital operation configuration. This study presents a promising method to detect historical in-plane manoeuvrers of satellites on a geostationary orbit (GEO). Since a manoeuvrer changes the orbital state of the spacecraft, its effect can be detected by comparing the observed data to a reference evolution. In this case, the  model is represented by the dynamical model STELA  based on a semi-analytical theory. The observed data is provided by the public American space object catalogue. The Two-line element (TLE) database contains the orbital state of each tracked object, however, not all six orbital parameters are interesting to study in terms of in- plane manoeuvrers. The evolution of the longitude and of the eccentricity vector is immediately affected by a manoeuvre that changes the shape or the size of an orbit. Within the longitude analysis, the manoeuvre epoch is estimated by focusing on the manoeuvre strategy. An operational spacecraft usually performs a manoeuvre as soon as the longitude motion threatens to violate the operational deadband. Consequently, the longitude evolution follows a parabolic motion. Two polynomial curves of second degree are laid over the observation: the first curve is derived from a simplified dynamical model and the second curve is directly obtained through a Least Squares (LS) fitting method. The discrepancy between the LS and physical fitted parabolas gives an indication on the quality of the input data, that is to say, of the TLEs. The detected manoeuvre epoch must be companioned by a confidential parameter that denotes the time range around the estimated epoch in which the manoeuvre is expected to have happened. The manoeuvre interval is then forwarded to the eccentricity analysis where the manoeuvrer epoch is estimated more precisely by studying the divergence between the observed and expected eccentricity vector evolution. The latter is propagated with STELA after having estimated the area-to-mass ratio that is needed in order to model the perturbation effects accurately upon which the performance of the dynamical reference model strongly depends. As soon as the observed eccentricity vector deviates significantly from the expected evolution, the epoch and the velocity ΔV of the manoeuvre can be recovered, too.

The Canadian Nanosatellite Advanced Propulsion System is a liquefied cold-gas thruster system that provides propulsive capabilities to CanX-4/-5, the Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment 4 and 5. With a launch date of early 2014, CanX-4/-5's primary mission objective is to demonstrate precise autonomous formation flight of nanosatellites in low Earth orbit. The high-level CanX-4/-5 mission and system architecture is described. The final design and assembly of the propulsion system is presented along with the lessons learned. A high-level test plan provides a roadmap of the testing required to qualify the propulsion system for flight. The setup and execution of these tests, as well as the analyses of the results found therein, are discussed in detail.