<h2>AAS 95-446</h2><h2>Distributed Control for On-Orbit Assembly</h2><h4>F. McQuade and C. R. McInnes, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland UK</h4><h2> Abstract </h2>Studies for large scale orbital platforms are now beyond the capacity of current large launch vehicles.  A solution then is to assemble prefabricated elements in orbit.  The infrastructure required to perform such a task using human labor is expensive in terms of both mass and cost.

An alternative is the use of autonomous maneuvering vehicles, employing a subsumption control architecture.  This paper examines the control aspects of such vehicles assembling extended rigid bodies on-orbit.  The distributed control system is based upon Lyapunov's theorem layer upon a Clohessy-Wiltshire model of the system orbital dynamics.
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