Coupled Dynamics and Integrated Control for Position and Attitude Motions of Spacecraft:A Survey

Inspired by the integrated guidance and control design for endo-atmospheric aircraft,the integrated position and attitude control of spacecraft has attracted increasing attention and gradually induced a wide variety of study results in last over two decades,fully incorporating control requirements and actuator characteristics of space missions.This paper presents a novel and comprehensive survey to the coupled position and attitude motions of spacecraft from the perspective of dynamics and control.To this end,a systematic analysis is firstly conducted in details to show the position and attitude mutual couplings of spacecraft.Particularly,in terms of the time discrepancy between spacecraft position and attitude motions,space missions can be categorized into two types:space proximity operation and space orbital maneuver.Based on this classification,the studies on the coupled dynamic modeling and the integrated control design for position and attitude motions of spacecraft are sequentially summarized and analyzed.On the one hand,various coupled position and dynamic formulations of spacecraft based on various mathematical tools are reviewed and compared from five aspects,including mission applicability,modeling simplicity,physical clearance,information matching and expansibility.On the other hand,the development of the integrated position and attitude control of spacecraft is analyzed for two space missions,and especially,five distinctive development trends are captured for space operation missions.Finally,insightful prospects on future development of the integrated position and attitude control technology of spacecraft are proposed,pointing out current primary technical issues and possible feasible solutions.

Coupled trajectory and attitude stability of displaced orbits

Coupled trajectory and attitude stability of displaced solar orbits is studied by using sailcraft with a kind of two-folding construction with two unequal rectangular plates forming a right angle. Three-dimensional coupled trajectory and attitude equations are developed for the coupled dynamical system, and the results show that all three types of displaced solar orbits widely referenced can be achieved through selecting an appropriate size of the two-folding sail. An anal- ysis of the corresponding linear stability of the trajectory and attitude coupled system is carried out, and both trajectory and attitude linearly stable orbits are found to exist in a small range of parameters, whose non-linear stability is then examined via numerical simulations. Finally, passively stable orbits are found to have weak stability, and such passive means of station-keeping are attractive and useful in practice because of its simplicity.

Integrated modeling of spacecraft relative motion dynamics using dual quaternion

To realize high accurate control of relative position and attitude between two spacecrafts, the coupling between position and attitude must be fully considered and a more precise model should be established. This paper breaks the traditional divide and conquer idea, and uses a mathematical tool, namely dual quaternion to establish the integrated 6 degree-of-freedom(6-DOF) model of relative position and attitude, which describes the coupled relative motion in a compact and efficient form and needs less information of the target. Considering the complex operation rules and the unclarity of the current relative motion model in dual quaternion, necessary mathematical foundations are given at first, followed by clear and detailed modeling process and analysis. Finally a generalized proportion-derivative(PD) controller law is designed. The simulation results show that based on the integrated model established by dual quaternion, this control law can achieve a high control accuracy of relative motion.

Finite-time coordination control for formation flying spacecraft

This paper investigates a distributed coordination control scheme using an adaptive terminal sliding mode for formation flying spacecraft with coupled attitude and translational dynamics. In order to overcome the singularity of the traditional fast terminal sliding manifold, a novel fast terminal sliding manifold is given. And then, based on the adaptive control method, a continuous robust coordinated controller is designed to compensate external disturbances and to alleviate the chattering phenomenon. The theoretical analysis shows that the coordinated controller can guarantee the finite-time stability of the overall closed-loop system through local information exchange, and numerical simulations also demonstrate its effectiveness.

Analytic optimal pose tracking control in close-range proximity operations with a non-cooperative target

This paper investigates an analytical optimal pose tracking control problem for chaser spacecraft during the close-range proximity operations with a non-cooperative space target subject to attitude tumbling and unknown orbital maneuvering.Firstly,the relative translational motion between the orbital target and the chaser spacecraft is described in the Line-of-Sight(LOS)coordinate frame along with attitude quaternion dynamics.Then,based on the coupled 6-Degree of Freedom(DOF)pose dynamic model,an analytical optimal control action consisting of constrained optimal control value,application time and its duration are proposed via exploring the iterative sequential action control algorithm.Meanwhile,the global closed-loop asymptotic stability of the proposed predictive control action is presented and discussed.Compared with traditional proximity control schemes,the highlighting advantages are that the application time and duration of the devised controller is applied discretely in light of the influence of the instantaneous pose configuration on the pose tracking performance with less energy consumptions rather than at each sample time.Finally,three groups of illustrative examples are organized to validate the effectiveness of the proposed analytical optimal pose tracking control scheme.