Guidance and control of an orbital net-capture system based on impulsive coordination

The guidance and control problem of the orbital net-capture system actuated by a serial of payloads installed at the terminals are investigated. Three debris capture procedures are presented, i.e., dynamic modeling for the payloads, trajectory planning and tracking of the net-capture system. Firstly, the relative orbit motion dynamics is established in the local-vertical and local-horizontal rotating frame, where the force from the net is considered as an external disturbance for each payload. Secondly, the desired capture trajectory is approximated using the polynomial with the boundary conditions at the place on the right above the space debris and the desired position. Thirdly, an impulsive coordinated control algorithm is proposed such that all payloads can cooperatively track the desired capture trajectory. Finally, numerical simulation of four payloads in the net-capture system capturing one static space debris is implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.