Relative Navigation and Guidance Technologies for Rendezvous and Docking

Relative navigation and guidance is a key operational technology required for rendezvous and docking. This paper intends to describe and review some recent patents related to the methods and devices of relative navigation and guidance, including laser guidance, GNSS and UWB guidance, and relative navigation using laser range finder. Corresponding to each of these patents, some reformative approaches and methods are presented in the paper. Especially, a method based on Hill equation is presented which can produce a state estimate to replace the interrupted the visible sensor measurement when, for example, the target satellite is in shadow and the Sun´s rays do not illuminate the target.