Autonomous Rendezvous, Control and Docking Experiment – Reflight 2

This paper provides an overview of the ARCADE-R2 experiment, which is a technology demonstrator that aimed to prove the feasibility of small scale satellite and/or aircraft systems with automatic (i) attitude determination, (ii) control and (iii) docking capabilities. The development of such capabilities could be fundamental to create, in the near future, fleets of cooperative, autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles for mapping, surveillance, inspection and remote observation of hazardous environments; small-class satellites could also benefit from the employment of docking systems to extend and reconfigure their mission profiles. The experiment was composed by a supporting structure, which holds a small vehicle with one translational and one rotational degree of freedom, and its fixed target. The two units feature relative navigation sensors, attitude control actuators and a docking mechanism, along with pressure and temperature sensors, and wind probes. The experiment flew on board the BEXUS 17 stratospheric balloon on October 10th, 2013, where several navigation-control-docking sequences were executed and data on the external pressure, temperature, wind speed and direction were collected, characterizing the atmospheric loads applied to the vehicle. This paper describes the critical components of ARCADE-R2 as well as the main results obtained from the balloon flight