You're invited to attend

Adaptive Control and Concurrent Learning
for Flexible Spacecraft

by

Riccardo Bevilacqua

Professor of Aerospace Engineering | Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU)

Thursday, April 6
3 - 4 p.m.
Clary Theatre in the Student Success Center

About the Seminar: 
A renewed interest in spacecraft with large deployables and on-orbit assembly justifies the interest in better control and estimation techniques. Technology advancements are enabling ambitious missions such as the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout, soon to be deployed from SLS, and the AFRL’s Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research Project (SSPIDR). NEA Scout holds an 86 square meters solar sail, while SSPIDR will be an incrementally assembled structure. Modeling limitations, storage deformations and partial deployments are some of the reasons why a simultaneous attitude control and structural estimation approach is here proposed. In addition, complex systems like the ones described earlier can be only partially verified on the ground, with orbital flight being the very first time there are tested.

This talk introduces the idea of adaptive control with integral concurrent learning to realize orbital attitude control and estimation of structural parameters. This Air Force funded effort started in spring of 2022, and current test cases are based on lumped parameter systems, with the future goal of modeling and estimating in the continuous domain.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Riccardo Bevilacqua is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). He holds a M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering (2002, cum laude), and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (2007), both from the University of Rome, "Sapienza", Italy. Dr. Bevilacqua is the recipient of two Young Investigator Awards, from AFOSR (2012) and ONR (2013), of the 2014 Dave Ward Memorial Lecture Award from the Aerospace Controls and Guidance Systems Committee, and of 6 Air Force Summer Fellowships (2012, 2015, and 2021 at AFRL Space Vehicle Directorate, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023 at AFRL Munitions Directorate). His research interests focus on spacecraft formation flight, space robotics and warheads/spacecraft fragment fly-out predictions. He has authored and co-authored more than 100 journal and conference publications on the topics. He is an AIAA Associate Fellow and IAA Member. He is the founder and chair of the IAA conference on Space Situational Awareness.