High-Fidelity Orbital Simulator for Testing Guidance and Control strategies in Target Inspection Maneuvers

This paper present the six-degree-of-freedom orbital simulator developed by the students within the course “Dynamics and Control of Aerospace Vehicles”. The paper outlines the rationale and objectives of the course, including the introduction of students to a practical experience in Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) systems through the use of the orbital simulator to perform a Rendezvous and Docking (RVD) maneuver. The simulator models the relative motion of a chaser spacecraft with respect to a target spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), enabling the implementation and testing of diverse GNC algorithms, components, and architectures within the Matlab/Simulink environment. Also, the paper presents a recent master’s thesis demonstrating the soundness of the simulator as a basis for advanced research purposes. In this thesis, an autonomous proximity inspection maneuver targeting an uncooperative spacecraft was executed. The study compared the performance of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) and Sliding Mode Control (SMC) strategies in tracking a reference trajectory generated by the Lyapunov Guidance Vector Field (LGVF). Furthermore, the impact of different sensor configurations on control performance was evaluated. The results demonstrate the proposed GNC strategy’s capability for autonomous maneuver execution, establishing the simulator as a valuable platform for academic and research purposes in the GNC field.