Abstract: Formation
flying is a critical element in DoD and NASA’s future space missions.
Many key problems for such formation flying missions can be formulated
as optimization problems. Due to nonconvexity of many constraints —
such as collision-avoidance constraints and attitude constraints –
guidance, control and estimation of spacecraft formations remain
challenging problems. In this talk, I will present new results, showing
that some nonconvex optimization problems in Formation Reconfiguration an
d Constrained Attitude Control problems can be approximated with convex optimization problems.