Autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations of spacecraft require the capability of onboard planning and executing highly constrained trajectories without ground support. This paper presents a general and rigorous methodology and algorithmic procedure toward this goal with a target vehicle that can be in an arbitrary orbit. The rendezvous and proximity operations problem is formulated as a nonlinear optimal control problem, subject to various state and control inequality constraints and equality constraints on interior points and terminal conditions. By a lossless relaxation technique, a relaxed problem is formed, the solution of which is proven to be equivalent to that of the original rendezvous and proximity operations problem. The relaxed problem is then solved by a novel successive solution process, in which the solutions of a sequence of constrained subproblems with linear, time-varying dynamics are sought. After discretization, each of these problems becomes a second-order cone programming problem. Their solutions, if they exist, are guaranteed to be found by a primal-dual interior-point algorithm. The efficacy of the proposed methodology is strongly supported by numerical experiments.


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    Title :

    Autonomous Trajectory Planning for Rendezvous and Proximity Operations by Conic Optimization


    Contributors:
    Lu, Ping (author) / Liu, Xinfu (author)

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2013-02-07


    Size :

    15 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English