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Spacecraft Rendezvous and Docking
Published in Yaguang Yang, Spacecraft Modeling, Attitude Determination, and Control Quaternion-based Approach, 2019
Spacecraft rendezvous is an important operation in many space missions. There has been extensive research in this field and hundreds of successful rendezvous missions, see, for example, the survey paper [116] and references therein. The entire rendezvous process can be divided into several phases, including phasing, close-range rendezvous, final approaching, and docking. In the early phase, the chaser flies to the target with the aid from the ground station and orbital translation control is the main concern. For this purpose, the well-known Hill [72] or Clohessy and Wiltshire [32] equations are adequate for the control system design if the orbit is circular. But in the final approaching and docking phase, coupled orbital and attitude control may be required. Moreover, it is desired to consider the case that the orbit of the target spacecraft is not circular. To achieve this requirement, more complex models introduced in [96, 148, 215] should be considered. Although these models are developed for more general purpose, they can be easily tailored for spacecraft rendezvous and docking control.
Analytical solutions to the matrix inequalities in the ILF control-observer scheme for non-cooperative rendezvous with unknown inertia parameters
Published in International Journal of Control, 2020
Spacecraft rendezvous, as a key technology in space exploration, has attracted considerable theoretical investigations and contributed to real space missions, such as assembling, re-supplying, exchanging of crew and docking. In some special space missions, such as space attack/defense, capturing and debris removing, the target spacecraft is non-cooperative which implies that it is not equipped with dedicated cooperative markers, it has no communication with the chaser nor the ground station, and it is even uncontrolled and inactive. Advanced guidance, navigation and control algorithms are required to achieve autonomous proximity operations. The control algorithm for non-cooperative rendezvous is studied in this paper, and the close range phase which starts at a range of only a few hundreds of metres or less is focused on.
Robust control for spacecraft rendezvous system with actuator unsymmetrical saturation: a gain scheduling approach
Published in International Journal of Control, 2018
With the increase of the orbital activity, control technology of spacecraft rendezvous has become more and more important. Successful rendezvous is the precondition of many space missions, such as repairing, intercepting, docking, large-scale structure assembling and satellite networking (Polites, 1999). When a target spacecraft is in a circular orbit and another chaser spacecraft in its neighbourhood, the relative motion between the two spacecrafts can be described by autonomous nonlinear differential equations. If the distance between them is much smaller than the orbit radius, the model can be described by the well-known C-W equation (Clohessy & Wiltshire, 1960). During the last few decades, the spacecraft rendezvous has been actively studied and many results in control theory and technologies have been developed (Xiao, Huo, Yang, & Zhang, 2015; Zhu, Xia, & Fu, 2011).
Control analysis and design via randomised coordinate polynomial minimisation
Published in International Journal of Control, 2022
Giuseppe C. Calafiore, Carlo Novara, Corrado Possieri
A space rendezvous is a manoeuvre in which a spacecraft (called the chaser) must approach another spacecraft (called the target) to a very close distance. These manoeuvres are important ingredients of many present and future space missions, see, e.g. Weiss et al. (2015), Q. Li et al. (2017). Traditionally, rendezvous, docking and similar kinds of manoeuvres are carried out ‘manually’, by means of ad-hoc corrections finalised to compensate possible positioning errors. In this simulated example, space rendezvous is carried out automatically, by means of NMPC.