Concurrent rendezvous control of underactuated spacecraft

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The concurrent control of spacecraft equipped with one-axis unilateral thruster and three-axis attitude actuator is considered in this paper. The proposed control law utilizes attitude control channels along with the single thrust force concurrently, for three-dimensional trajectory tracking and rendezvous with a target object. The concurrent controller also achieves orbital transfer to low Earth orbits with long range separation. To demonstrate the orbit transfer capabilities of the concurrent controller, a smooth elliptical orbit transfer trajectory for co-planar circular orbits is designed. The velocity change and energy consumption of the designed orbit transfer trajectory is observed to be equivalent to that of Hohmann transfer.