Obstacle-Avoidance Safety-Guaranteed Rendezvous Control with a Velocity Safety Corridor and Prescribed Performance

A novel safety-guaranteed rendezvous control (SGRC) method is proposed for obstacles avoidance during the rendezvous with a noncooperative target in this paper. An artificial potential field with the addition of a velocity safety corridor is used to describe the motion of space and achieve the constraint on the global velocity of the service spacecraft during the rendezvous. Furthermore, the velocity error term of the system is constrained by combining the prescribed performance control (PPC) method, thereby improving the steady- and transient-state performance of the system while reducing fuel consumption. On this basis, a newly constructed virtual auxiliary state containing both artificial potential fields and self-bounded system state error is developed, and a safety-guaranteed control method capable of achieving rendezvous with the noncooperative target for obstacle avoidance is designed. Two sets of numerical simulation results verify the effectiveness as well as the adaptability of the proposed control method.