A spacecraft benchmark problem for hybrid control and estimation

The development of autonomous systems is a growing area of importance across a wide range of commercial, government, and civil applications. A number of new technical tools for the design and analysis of complex autonomous systems have been proposed in the literature, including the use of hybrid systems modeling and analysis. This paper develops an exemplar autonomous system problem, namely an autonomous spacecraft rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (ARPOD) mission, as a benchmark problem for hybrid systems analysis and control techniques. The paper provides a complete mathematical description of the ARPOD hybrid dynamics/control problem, as well as providing details on variants that can be included to emphasize different elements of the hybrid system and to increase or decrease the complexity of the problem. Some baseline results are provided for comparison.