Formation Flight of Spacecraft in Earth Orbit via MPC

In the future space development, the formation flights of multiple spacecraft in earth orbit are planned for science or engineering missions. For the purpose, this paper proposes to use model predictive control (MPC). Although there are many control problems, this paper focuses on four key issues, i.e., the orbit eccentricity, the pulsive thruster features, the spacecraft mass changes and the length of sampling periods. We intend to overcome these problems in MPC framework. In this paper, the simple control schemes are shown and some numerical simulation results are illustrated in order to evaluate their feasibility