Tag Archives: Controls

Asteroid Prospector Orbiting Apophis

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Asteroid Prospector is a 6U CubeSat designed to survey asteroids. It uses a Busek Ion engine to spiral out of earth orbit and rendezvous with an asteroid. It then uses its reaction control thruster system, which employ ECAPS green propellant thrusters, to perform near-asteroid operations. Here is a picture of the spacecraft in circular orbit mode.

AsteroidProspector
The simulation is running in our Simulation Framework. The graphical display uses our VisualCommander client on the Mac.

The flight software is implemented in our ControlDeck C++ class library. Both the simulation and control software are available as part of our Aero/Astro vehicle control products.

You can see a movie of the spacecraft on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvPqwFKGRKw

We presented our Asteroid Prospector mission concept on Tuesday Aug 13th, 2013  the Small Satellites Conference in Logan, Utah in Session VI: Strength in Numbers. A copy of our paper is available here.

New PSS MATLAB Product – Core Control Toolbox

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We have just released our new MATLAB product – the Core Control Toolbox (CCT). We created the Core Control Toolbox as a base product for those customers who may have interests outside of aircraft and spacecraft modeling and simulation. It features many of the general purpose functions found in our Spacecraft Control Toolbox. Like all our Toolbox products, CCT comes with complete source code. Users can view and modify any function in the toolbox to suit their particular needs. We’ve included a number of our filtering, graphics, mathematics, quaternion, robotics, and other general purpose functions.

Below one of our robotics functions is featured! The Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm (SCARA) is used in many industrial applications requiring assembly in a plane, like manufacturing a PC board.

The SCARA movie shows a SCARA robot following a straight line trajectory. The trajectory is computed by a dedicated SCARA inverse kinematics routine.

Check out what CCT and our other MATLAB toolboxes have to offer!
Core Control Toolbox
Aircraft Control Toolbox
CubeSat Toolbox
Spacecraft Control Toolbox