SPACEFLIGHT UNDER UNCERTAINTY: TOWARDS SAFE SPACECRAFT AUTONOMY AND ROBUST MISSION DESIGN

Safety assurance under uncertainty is of increasing importance in spaceflight.

It is crucial for a greater level of spacecraft autonomy as well as for designing robust space missions.

It is particularly so when spacecraft must operate in sensitive dynamics that quickly skew the uncertainty distribution and/or when communication opportunities are scarce (e.g., remote environments, low-budget missions, operation of a large fleet of spacecraft).

The demand for such capabilities will only increase as we expand our activities into cislunar space and beyond.

To address these challenges, Prof. K. Oguri's research group at Purdue has been working to advance theories and algorithms for spaceflight under uncertainty.

His group leverages control theory, uncertainty quantification, and optimization to rigorously formulate a framework that integrates uncertainty modeling and stochastic optimal control into spaceflight problems.

The developed frameworks quantify, control, and constrain the risks associated with uncertainties while minimizing a statistical cost metric (e.g., delta-V99).

This talk will present relevant recent results and ongoing efforts in Prof. K. Oguri's group at Purdue, including safe autonomous cislunar navigation/maneuver planning and robust trajectory optimization under uncertainty in cislunar and interplanetary space.

Speaker:

Dr. Kenshiro (Ken) Oguri is an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. Ken's research interest includes dynamical systems, control theory, stochastic systems, and optimization as well as their application to space mission design, navigation, and spacecraft autonomy. At Purdue, he currently leads a research group of 14 graduate students (8 Ph.D. and 6 M.S. students). Prior to joining Purdue, he worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2021. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021 and M.S. and B.S. in Aero/Astro from the University of Tokyo in 2017 and 2015, respectively.

02.12.2024