A Novel Concept for Guidance and Control of Spacecraft Orbital Maneuvers

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is the design of guidance and control algorithms for orbital space maneuvers. A 6-dof orbital simulator, based on Clohessy-Wiltshire-Hill equations, is developed in C language, considering cold gas reaction thrusters and reaction wheels as actuation system. The computational limitations of on-board computers are also included. A combination of guidance and control algorithms for an orbital maneuver is proposed: (i) a suitably designed Zero-Effort-Miss/Zero-Effort-Velocity (ZEM/ZEV) algorithm is adopted for the guidance and (ii) a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) is used for the attitude control. The proposed approach is verified for different cases, including external environment disturbances and errors on the actuation system.

“Flyable” Guidance and Control Algorithms for Orbital Rendezvous Maneuver

“…The complete formulation is presented in [27], where simulation results are presented, confirming that this algorithm is promising in terms of disturbance rejection, robustness and performance, providing strict compliance of terminal conditions with nominal reference states, as a major achievement of ZEM/ZEV algorithm implementation. The authors of [27] combine this guidance design with a classical linear quadratic regulator (LQR) attitude control, discussed in Section 5.…”

“…Starting from the general formulation of the ZEM/ZEV, a novel approach for the development of a GNC algorithm was proposed in [27] for low Earth orbit environment. The idea is to modify the classical ZEM/ZEV (as in [23], [24] and in Section 4.2), starting from an ideal trajectory and considering the ideal positions and velocities as final parameters.…”

“…As extensively discussed in [27], the modified ZEM/ZEV is very effective in driving a chaser spacecraft along a complete rendezvous and docking maneuver, even in the presence of disturbances due to external perturbations and to the imperfections of the actuation system.…”

“…Applying this approach, as discussed in [27], the overall control law is less sensitive to the time-to-go t go , as compared to what usually happens in the classical ZEM/ZEV approach. Moreover, the use of a short-term prediction horizon Δt allows computing predicted position and velocity with small errors even in the case of high nonlinear systems.…”

“…The authors of [27] combine this guidance design with a classical linear quadratic regulator (LQR) attitude control, discussed in Section 5.…”