Ground experiment on rendezvous and docking with a spinning target using multistage control strategy

The spacecraft rendezvous and docking technology has been playing an important role in space missions. This study deals with the planar rendezvous and docking of a chaser spacecraft simulator with a spinning target spacecraft simulator on the air-bearing testbed. On the basis of relative pose information for positions and attitudes, the paper presents the controller formulated in an analytical form, which accounts for the collision avoidance constraint between the two simulators and simultaneously takes the obstacle collision restriction into consideration. The stability analysis ensures that the system state controlled asymptotically converges to the desired state. In addition, to demonstrate the hardware-in-the-loop experiment verification, the paper presents the two floating simulators equipped with electromagnetic docking mechanism, as well as a closed-loop system via the binocular vision-based data acquisition method and the wireless transmission device. The test results show that the multistage control strategy proposed can successfully realize the collision-free docking of the chaser simulator and the spinning target simulator.