Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Spacecraft Rendezvous in Near-Circular Orbits with Time-Varying Saturation Constraint

An adaptive sliding mode control scheme is proposed for spacecraft rendezvous constrained by the external perturbations, the non-circularity of reference orbit, and the time-varying saturation, which can be induced by the temporal characteristics and the accidental faults of actuators. With some reasonable assumptions, we prove that the adaptive control scheme can achieve asymptotic stability without using the effectiveness information of actuators. Compared with the existing results, numerical experiment with longer initial distances, lower saturation bounds, and better performance is achieved within a nonlinear two-body system.