Space-Flight Autonomous Leading CONcepts (Space-FALCON) Lab

News

Giusy Falcone to Give an Invited Talk at the IROS 2026 Space Robotics Workshop

September 27, 2026

Giusy Falcone will present the invited talk From Constellation Coordination to Mission-Scale Digital Twins at Space Exploration and Sustained Operations Beyond Earth, the Space Robotics Workshop at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh.

The workshop brings together the space and terrestrial robotics communities to advance autonomy, robotic systems, and sustained operations beyond Earth.

Workshop details →

New Journal Paper on On-Orbit Servicer Propulsion

July 27, 2026

Our paper, Stochastic Mission-Sampling for Comparing On-Orbit Servicer Propulsion Architectures Under Uncertainty, is now published online in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.

The paper introduces a stochastic mission-sampling framework for comparing chemical, electric, hybrid, and multimode propulsion architectures under uncertain on-orbit servicing demand.

Read the paper →

Michigan Housing Honored Instructor Recognition

2026–2027

Giusy Falcone has been named a Michigan Housing Honored Instructor for the 2026–2027 academic year.

Teaching is a central part of the lab’s work, and this recognition means a great deal to us.

Two Papers at IEEE Aerospace 2026

March 2026

Space-FALCON Lab had an amazing time presenting two papers at the IEEE Aerospace Conference this year.

One paper, Multi-agent Angle-Only Relative Orbit Determination via Distributed Filtering, presented by Giusy Falcone and written by Giovanni Romagnoli, explored cooperative relative orbit determination for distributed satellite systems using angle-only measurements and distributed filtering.

The second paper, Verification of SpaceAGORA.jl 6-DOF Dynamics Using University of Michigan SmallSats Telemetry, presented by Evan Yu, focused on validating SpaceAGORA.jl against flight telemetry from CYGNSS and GRIFEX.

Giovanni Romagnoli Joined the Lab

February 2026

Giovanni Romagnoli from the University of Pisa joined Space-FALCON Lab to work on extending our distributed relative orbit determination framework to multi-target tracking with collaborative data association.

We are very happy to have him in the lab and excited about this new collaboration.

AIAA SciTech Forum 2026

January 2026

Members of our lab attended the AIAA SciTech Forum 2026 this January!