Compensation of Velocity Divergence Caused by Dynamic Response for Hardware-in-the-Loop Docking Simulator

The hardware-in-the-loop simulation on the ground is effective to test the contact dynamics of the spacecraft in space. However, it is very challenging due to the simulation velocity divergence caused by the time delay. In this study, a compensation approach for the velocity divergence caused by the dynamic response of the motion simulator is proposed. Traditional delay compensation requires the time delay or the delay model to be known. In practice, the dynamic response of the motion simulator is time varying and unknown. This motivates development of the model-free compensation approach. It compensates the contact force from the real-time response error of the motion simulator and the real-time identified contact stiffness and damping. The proposed compensation approach is easy to implement since it does not require the dynamic response model of the motion simulator. Simulations and experiments are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed compensation approach.