An Angles-Only Navigation and Control Scheme for Noncooperative Rendezvous Operations

The use of vision sensors for noncooperative rendezvous operations is attractive, especially for microspacecraft, because vision sensors are usually of small size, light weight, and low cost but provide rich information. However, vision-based rendezvous operations are extremely challenging. It is difficult for vision sensors to accurately measure the relative distance between a chaser spacecraft and a noncooperative target. In this paper, we propose a systematic angles-only navigation and control scheme for noncooperative rendezvous operations. The scheme is a hybrid framework that combines offline trajectory planning that integrates observability condition and online trajectory tracking based on nonlinear model predictive control. A navigation filter is used in the online trajectory tracking to estimate the relative motion by using only angle measurements. In the scheme, the chaser spacecraft can closely track the desired trajectory and simultaneously guarantee the estimation accuracy of the navigation filter. This paper provides a general and practical framework for angles-only rendezvous operations and the effectiveness is verified by extensive simulations.