Integrated relative position and attitude control of spacecraft in proximity operation missions

This paper addresses an integrated relative position and attitude control strategy for a pursuer spacecraft flying to a space target in proximity operation missions. Relative translation and rotation dynamics are both presented, and further integratedly considered due to mutual couplings, which results in a six degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) control system. In order to simultaneously achieve relative position and attitude requirements, an adaptive backstepping control law is designed, where a command filter is introduced to overcome "explosion of terms". Within the Lyapunov framework, the proposed controller is proved to ensure the ultimate boundedness of relative position and attitude signals, in the presence of external disturbances and unknown system parameters. Numerical simulation demonstrates the effect of the designed control law.