A delay compensation approach for hardware-in-the-loop simulation of space collision

The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is an attractive and effective approach to simulate the contact dynamics of flying objects in space. However, the HIL contact simulation is very difficult due to the simulation divergence caused by the time delay existing in the HIL simulation closed-loop system. In this study, the static delay of the force measurement system is compensated by the phase lead. The dynamic delay of the motion simulator is compensated by the response error based force compensation. Simulations and experiments show that the proposed approach can effectively compensate the simulation divergence and guarantee the reproduction fidelity of the contact process in space.