ABSTRACT
Chapter 15 considers coupled orbit and attitude control that is the key technology for spacecraft rendezvous and soft docking. Coupled orbit and attitude control is an extensively studied problem with renewed interest because of installations of powerful on-board computers, availability of advanced theoretical results, and requirements for better performance in future missions. Section 15.1 is an introduction about the recent development of different design methods. Section 15.2 presents a complete spacecraft model for rendezvous and soft docking, which includes a model for translation dynamics and a model for attitude dynamics. This complete model is applicable to both circular and ellipse orbits. The MPC control using robust pole assignmentis again selected as the control system design method. The reason behind this selection is due to the strict requirement for soft docking which requires no relative position oscillation crossing the horizontal line between target and chaser spacecraft. Simulation examples are provided in section 15.3. Both circular and ellipse orbits of the target spacecraft are considered in these examples.
