Jean-Baptiste Bouvier, a third-year Ph.D. student from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was one of four students awarded the John V. Breakwell Award during the 2022 AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference held in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The award of $1,000 was in support of travel to present his paper, titled “Resilience of Orbital Inspections to Partial Loss of Control Authority of the Chaser Satellite,” was co-written with fellow UIUC graduate student Himmat Panag and UIUC assistant professors Melkior Ornik and Robyn Woollands. The paper was selected by a committee composed of academic and industry experts in the field of aerospace engineering.
Bouvier’s research lies in control theory and studies the resilience of control systems to partial loss of authority over their actuators. More specifically, Bouvier aims at verifying whether the controlled actuators can still steer the system to its target despite some actuators producing uncontrolled outputs. For time-constrained missions, reachability is not sufficient, so he also investigates the quantification of the maximal time-penalty incurred by the malfunctioning system.
The work was funded by an Early Stage Innovations grant from NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program and a grant from NASA's Concepts for Ocean Worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program.