Terminal spacecraft rendezvous and capture with LASSO model predictive control

Abstract

The recently investigated ℓ_asso model predictive control (MPC) is applied to the terminal phase of a spacecraft rendezvous and capture mission. The interaction between the cost function and the treatment of minimum impulse bit is also investigated. The propellant consumption with ℓ_asso MPC for the considered scenario is noticeably less than with a conventional quadratic cost and control actions are sparser in time. Propellant consumption and sparsity are competitive with those achieved using a zone-based ℓ₁ cost function, whilst requiring fewer decision variables in the optimisation problem than the latter. The ℓ_asso MPC is demonstrated to meet tighter specifications on control precision and also avoids the risk of undesirable behaviours often associated with pure ℓ₁ stage costs.

Keywords:

• predictive control
• LASSO
• spacecraft control
• sparse control
• tuning, non-smooth characteristics

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by EPSRC Grants EP/G030308/1 and EP/G066477/1.