Global stabilization of spacecraft rendezvous system subject to input saturation via gain scheduling

The problem of global stabilization of the circular orbit spacecraft rendezvous system with input saturation is studied in this paper. The rendezvous process is divided into the in-plane motion and the out-plane motion based on C-W equations with saturation nonlinearities in the actuators. By considering the advantages of the recently developed parametric Lyapunov equation based design method and the invariant sets theory, a globally stabilizing gain scheduling nonlinear controller is proposed. To apply the proposed gain scheduling approach, only a scalar nonlinear equation is required to be solved online. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.