Limited-thrust relative position holding for adjacent spacecraft with thruster nonlinearity

The problem of spacecraft relative position holding with limited thrust and thruster nonlinearity is investigated in this paper. The relative dynamic model with sampled-data measurement is established based on the Clohessy-Wiltshire (C-W) equations. Thruster nonlinearity and limited thrust constraint are taken into consideration. Then, the relative position holding problem is regarded as a sampled-data output tracking control problem. Based on Lyapunov stabilization theory, the sampled-data controller is designed by solving a convex optimization problem. Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.