Fast Relative Guidance Approach For Autonomous Rendezvous And Docking Control

Relative guidance for autonomous rendezvous and docking is a key technology for many current and future space missions, such as the unmanned on-orbit service. In these missions, it is normally required that the chaser spacecraft can plan a trajectory to the target rapidly, and control the chaser\u27s attitude to align with the docking port of the target. This paper presents a recently developed bio-inspired virtual motion camouflage methodology to compute the optimal or near optimal orbit and attitude trajectories for relative guidance of rendezvous and docking missions rapidly. In this approach, the dimension of the optimization parameters and then the computational cost of the online trajectory planning can be reduced significantly. Multiple simulations are provided to demonstrate the capabilities of the algorithm. © 2011 SPIE