ORBEX-A

Problem

Capturing a tumbling, noncooperative object requires a chaser to rendezvous while the target motion and environmental dynamics remain uncertain. A controller must adapt without discarding the safety margins that make the approach robust.

Contribution

The work develops adaptive dynamic tube model predictive control around nonlinear rendezvous optimization, robust tubes, set-membership identification, and target-aware docking constraints.

The public implementation supports single- and multi-chaser missions and reports physical margins, tightened constraints, parameter estimates, target attitude, and inter-chaser spacing.

Outcome

The research was published at the 2025 IEEE Aerospace Conference and is accompanied by a reproducible public simulation codebase.

The evidence is computational: the project does not claim flight or hardware validation.