The recent addition of autonomous formation flying spacecraft to the world's satellite fleet
provides new motivation to study feedback control techniques. In this thesis, we develop nonlinear orbit control laws for use in spacecraft orbital maneuvers, and spacecraft formation flying. We apply these new control laws to a number of sample maneuvers, including formation stablishment and formation keeping maneuvers for NASA-Goddard's Leonardo-BRDF formation, and coupled orbit, and attitude maneuvers for HokieSat, a spacecraft designed, and built by
students at Virginia Tech to fly in the Ionospheric Observation Nanosatellite Formation (ION-F). To provide target orbit states for feedback control, we develop and apply an algorithm to calculate a formation master orbit representing the geometric center of the formation. We also define a new technique for choosing orbital element feedback gains which appropriately scales the gains for orbit maintenance, and provides an excellent starting point for gain optimization. The orbital element feedback control law, augmented by mean motion control, and applied with appropriate gains, forces asymptotic convergence to a spacecraft target orbit, for a large variety of spacecraft maneuvers.
