Nonlinear suboptimal tracking control of spacecraft approaching a tumbling target

We investigate the close-range relative motion and control of a spacecraft approaching a tumbling target. Unlike the traditional rigid-body dynamics with translation and rotation about the center of mass(CM), the kinematic coupling between translation and rotation is taken into consideration to directly describe the motion of the spacecraft's sensors or devices which are not coincident with the CM. Thus, a kinematically coupled 6 degrees-of-freedom(DOF) relative motion model for the instrument(feature point) is set up. To make the chaser spacecraft's feature point track the target's, an optimal tracking problem is defined and a control law with a feedback-feedforward structure is designed. With quasi-linearization of the nonlinear dynamical system, the feedforward term is computed from a specified constraint about the dynamical system and the reference model, and the feedback action is derived starting from the state-dependent Ricca equation(SDRE). The proposed controller is compared with an existing suboptimal tracking controller, and numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.     

Nonlinear control of spacecraft formation flying with disturbance rejection and collision avoidance

A nonlinear controller for disturbances rejection and collision avoidance is proposed for spacecraft formation flying.The formation flying is described by a nonlinear model with the J_2 perturbation and atmospheric drag. Based on the theory of the state-dependent Riccati equation(SDRE), a finite time nonlinear control law is developed for the nonlinear dynamics involved in formation flying. Then, a compensative internal mode(IM) control law is added to eliminate disturbances.These two control laws compose a finite time nonlinear tracking controller with disturbances rejection. Moreover, taking safety requirements into account, the repulsive control law is incorporated in the composite controller to perform collision avoidance manoeuvres. A numerical simulation is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Compared to the conventional control method, the proposed method provides better performance in the presence of the obstacles and external disturbances.