Autonomous Game Control for Spacecraft Rendezvous via Adaptive Perception and Interaction

This article studies the autonomous game control problem for spacecraft rendezvous by using the adaptive perception and interaction. The rendezvous mission involves two spacecraft (named by autonomous spacecraft a, and the other spacecraft o, respectively), in which the control strategy of spacecraft o is determined by only itself and cannot be intervened, but the control law of spacecraft a needs to be designed to achieve the rendezvous under the condition that only the relative position and velocity of spacecraft in the rendezvous system are available. By formulating the rendezvous system as a two-player linear quadratic differential game with unknown intent of spacecraft o, an autonomous game control method is proposed for spacecraft a by using the adaptive perception and interaction. This game control approach removes the requirement for knowing the intent of spacecraft o, relaxes the persistent excitation condition in traditional adaptive estimation methods, and guarantees the asymptotic stability of the rendezvous system. Furthermore, the intent (i.e., the weighting matrix in the cost function) of spacecraft o is inferred by solving a residual minimization problem. Finally, a simulation study is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the developed autonomous game control strategy.