Adaptive Backstepping Control for Spacecraft Rendezvous on Elliptical Orbits Based on Transformed Variables Model

This paper investigates the problem of relative motion control for spacecraft rendezvous on an arbitrary elliptical orbit. The simplified dynamic model describing the relative motion between the chaser spacecraft and the target spacecraft is established via using transformed variables. Due to the presence of time variant parameters in this novel model, robust control scheme and adaptive control scheme are designed to solve the rendezvous problem. Theoretical analyses and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.