Omnicopters for Spacecraft Simulation
May 1, 2024
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1 min read
Senior design project and MS thesis component, funded by the LINCS Lab at the Air Force Research Laboratory ($5,000 CRADA award).
Omnicopters — multirotor vehicles with full 6-DOF control authority — were used to simulate spacecraft attitude and translation dynamics in a hardware-in-the-loop configuration. Key contributions:
- Determined optimal motor placements and orientations for full controllability
- Developed a novel control scheme for rejecting air disturbances in indoor environments
- Validated the platform as a low-cost proxy for orbital spacecraft dynamics testing
Authors
Graduate Researcher
Doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder, Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. Research in differential game theory, safe multi-agent systems, and computational astrodynamics — with a focus on algorithms that are tractable enough to run onboard while providing formal guarantees.