Dynamic control of docking of adaptive space structure based on artificial potential method

Abstract

For the soft docking of a space vehicle with a target, it is important for the vehicle to accurately adjust the approaching velocity and direction to the target. In the present paper, we study the control of the approaching motion of a docking interface of adaptive space structures by proposing a couple of improvements for the artificial potential method. The new optimal control laws make the interface of the structure move along an assigned straight path to the target and reach it with an assigned attitude angle. The effectiveness of the proposed control laws has been confirmed by numerical analyses on the docking motion of a space robot with two or five arms and a hand, and a truss-type adaptive space structure consisting of four shear-deformation modules.