A Composite Robust Fault-Tolerant Control Scheme for Limited-Thrust Spacecraft Rendezvous in Near-Circular Orbits

Neng Wan,Weiran Yao,Mingming Shi

doi:10.1115/1.4037211

Abstract

External perturbations and actuator faults are two practical and significant issues that deserve designers' considerations when synthesizing the controllers for spacecraft rendezvous. A composite robust fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme that does not require the fault information is proposed in this paper for limited-thrust rendezvous in near-circular orbits. Within the control scheme, a reliable integral sliding mode (ISM) auxiliary controller and a modified guaranteed cost FTC are, respectively, developed to attenuate the external disturbances and to stabilize the nominal rendezvous system with actuator faults. Comparisons with previous works as well as a more practical and challenging simulation example are presented to verify the advantages of this composite control scheme.

Highlights

Autonomous rendezvous is a key operational technology in astronautic missions that involve more than one spacecraft, such as crew exchange, spacecraft assembly, maintenance, and monitoring
Due to some similarities between far range rendezvous and close range rendezvous, researchers would collectively refer to them as the terminal rendezvous, and as the control problem is a crucial issue for the automation of spacecraft rendezvous, it has been and continues to be an appealing area of study
The rest of this paper mainly focuses on the rendezvous problem based on the relative navigation method, and some works relying on absolute navigation are given in [2,3,4,5,6,7]

Summary

Introduction

Autonomous rendezvous is a key operational technology in astronautic missions that involve more than one spacecraft, such as crew exchange, spacecraft assembly, maintenance, and monitoring. We will synthesize a robust guaranteed cost tracking controller for terminal rendezvous in near-circular orbits. The rest of this paper mainly focuses on the rendezvous problem based on the relative navigation method, and some works relying on absolute navigation are given in [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Differed by the methods used in linearizing the equations of motion, rendezvous in circular, near-circular, and elliptical orbits are the three main branches that have been studied by precursors. Via a LMI approach, Yang et al [31] designed a controller for thrust-limited rendezvous in circular orbits. Motivated by the above discussions, this paper designs a guaranteed cost tracking controller for thrust-limited rendezvous in near-circular orbits via a LMI method. If the dimensions of matrices are not explicitly stated, they are assumed to be compatible for algebraic operation

Dynamic Model and Problem Formulation

Main Results

Simulation Results and Discussion

Conclusions