Authors

Harish Vernekar, Leonard Vance, Jekan Thangavelautham

Abstract

This paper presents Layer 1 of ARISE (Autonomous Reconfigurable Infrastructure for Swarm-based Exploration): a separation damping layer that rapidly suppresses post-release tip-off and drift in a carrier-deputy spacecraft swarm. We model each vehicle as a mechanical port-Hamiltonian (pH) system evolving on the Special Euclidean group \( S E(3) \) and shape a convex storage function about the desired relative pose. By injecting collocated damping through the body-wrench port, the closed loop is made strictly passive, so the shaped Hamiltonian serves as a Lyapunov storage that decreases monotonically. We provide compact passivity guarantees in continuous time and in sampled implementation, including a bounded-delay extension using a passivity observer/controller (PO/PC). To realize the commanded wrench under actuator limits, we use a constrained allocator posed as a bounded nonnegative least-squares (BNLS) problem and give a condition under which damping dominates allocation and saturation errors. In a representative near-Earth-object flyby separation case study (Apophis-2029 reference), the layer drives both carrier and deputies to low-rate, low-drift conditions within minutes and remains robust to thrust dispersion, inertia variation, saturation, and fixed command latency. These results show that a minimal, passivity-based realization can reliably drain separation transients and hand off the swarm to subsequent formation-setting and pointing phases with clear stability margins.

Citation

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Vernekar_2026,
  title={{ARISE: Continuous Port–Hamiltonian Damping at ESPA Injection for High Speed Flyby}},
  DOI={10.1109/aero66936.2026.11519786},
  booktitle={{2026 IEEE Aerospace Conference}},
  publisher={IEEE},
  author={Vernekar, Harish and Vance, Leonard and Thangavelautham, Jekan},
  year={2026},
  pages={1--13}
}

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References