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About

Fred Y. Hadaegh is a leading researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory whose work has fundamentally shaped the fields of spacecraft formation flying, autonomous swarm systems, and distributed space missions. His most influential contribution, a landmark 2004 survey on spacecraft formation flying control—now cited over 528 times—established foundational frameworks for designing and analyzing control laws governing multiple coupled spacecraft, becoming an essential reference for the aerospace community. Building on this foundation, Hadaegh pioneered scalable algorithms for robotic swarms, developing distributed auction-based assignment and sequential convex programming techniques capable of coordinating hundreds to thousands of agents under real-world communication constraints, earning nearly 200 citations. His research extends from theory to practice: ground demonstration campaigns validated precision formation maneuvers to near-flight standards, directly supporting ambitious missions like the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer. More recently, Hadaegh has advanced autonomous in-orbit satellite assembly, ultra-soft electromagnetic docking technologies, and decentralized pose estimation for spacecraft swarms, pushing the frontier toward fully autonomous on-orbit construction and reconfiguration. His development of the M-STAR six-degree-of-freedom testbed further bridges algorithmic research and hardware validation. Across his career, Hadaegh's work represents a comprehensive, end-to-end vision for next-generation distributed space systems.