Adaptive Control for Spacecraft Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking under 6-DOF Motion Constraints

Hongyang Dong, Qinglei Hu, Maruthi R. Akella

Abstract: This paper addresses the six-degree-of-freedom adaptive control problem for final phase proximity operations of spacecraft autonomous rendezvous and docking in the presence of parameter uncertainties. The salient feature of this work is that motion constraints during the proximity phase are considered in the proposed adaptive control formulation. Dual quaternions are employed to describe the coupled rotation and translation model of spacecraft, and an artificial potential fucntion is designed to encode information regarding motion constraints. In order to account for mass and inertia uncertainties, a non-certainty-equivalence adaptive controller is presented under the dual-quaternion formalism, which guarantees the arrival of the follower spacecraft at the docking port of the leader with a prescribed relative pose, while accommodating for parameter uncertainties and complying with underlying motion constraints. Simulation results are demonstrated to show the various features of the proposed adaptive control design.