This project will advance the Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking (AR&D) GNC system by testing it on hardware, particularly in a flight processor, with a goal of testing it in IPAS with the Waypoint L2 AR&D scenario. The entire Agency supports development of a Commodity for Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking (CARD) as outlined in the Agency-wide Community of Practice whitepaper entitled: 'A Strategy for the U.S. to Develop and Maintain a Mainstream Capability for Automated/Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking in Low Earth Orbit and Beyond'. The whitepaper establishes that (1) the US is in a continual state of AR&D point-designs and therefore there is no US 'off-the-shelf' AR&D capability in existence today, (2) the US has fallen behind our foreign counterparts particularly in the autonomy of AR&D systems, (3) development of an AR&D commodity is a national need that would benefit NASA, our commercial partners, and DoD, and (4) an initial estimate indicates that the development of a standardized AR&D capability could save the US approximately $60M for each AR&D project and cut each project's AR&D flight system implementation time in half.
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