Credits: 9

Learning objectives
Guidance, navigation and control systems for interplanetary probes. Propulsion system for robotic probes: solar sail and electric propulsion for interplanetary missions. Rendezvous and docking for robotic probes. Movable robots for planetary exploration: Guidance, navigation and control systems for movable robots. Holonomic and nonholonomic systems. Configuration and subsystems analysis. Navigation sensors for planetary robots: active and passive vision systems. Position sensors and absolute and relative motion sensors. Path planning. Data Acquisition and conversion systems. Lander Robots: Guidance, navigation and control during the landing of a robotic vehicle. Landing on planets and asteroids. Study of the automatic descent phases. Trajectory control for soft-landing. Re-targeting for an automatic lander. Cooperative Robots: Centralized and distributed cooperative control. Modular robots. Navigation and control of multi-agent systems. Ground simulation systems for cooperative control algorithms.