Omnicopters for Spacecraft Simulation
May 1, 2024
·
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
Outland is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder, Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. His research is 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.