Navigation and Guidance Algorithm for Spacecraft Autonomous Rendezvous

Paper number

IAC-06-C1.7.07

Author

Dr. Yingzi He, Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, China

Coauthor

Dr. Ying Chen, Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, China

Coauthor

Mr. Guo Li, Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, China

Year

2006

Abstract

With the development of the formation-flying, spacecraft on-orbit service, and the construction of large space station, etc. , the requirement to the relative navigation, guidance and control during the rendezvous is more and more pressing.
   This paper presents a kind of relative navigation and guidance algorithm to approach a target spacecraft in a near circular orbit. There are large numbers of research results in published literature, however, such literature appears to lack a simple, straight forward, practicable analysis of guiding a chaser spacecraft to approach a target spacecraft. The present paper attempts to fill this need.
   The paper is comprised of three sections. In the first section, the flying task is described, the design object is indicated, and the difficulty is mentioned. In the second section, the relative navigation algorithm based on available measurements is researched firstly; A kind of new navigation filtering algorithm is discussed, an Extended Kalman Filter based on indirect measurements which are transformed from the actual measurements is designed; The navigation performance and the practicability are both shown perfect using above method. The rendezvous guidance algorithm is researched secondly, a kind of new multi-pulses guidance law based on the optimal control theory is proposed, with this method, the fuel-optimized analytical result under any fixed rendezvous time is obtained. The relative orbit control strategy which is obtained at the beginning of the rendezvous can be adjusted at the proper time during the process of rendezvous based on the real-time relative navigation results. Analysis and calculating results indicate that both the guidance precision and the engineering feasibility are acquired. Based above relative navigation and guidance algorithm, the closed-loop control system is designed, the on-orbit software is developed and its correctness is shown by the mathematical simulation. In the third section, the hardware-in-the-loop simulation work is done; the relative movement of two spacecrafts is simulated through the motion of the mechanical platform, the real sensors outputting the relative measure information are introduced. For the first time, the hardware-in-the-loop experiment for spacecraft rendezvous is accomplished in Chinese, plentiful simulation results proved again that our research described above is feasible and practicable.

Abstract document

IAC-06-C1.7.07.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-06-C1.7.07.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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