Dual Quaternion based fixed-time Tracking Control for Spacecraft

This paper investigates the fixed-time rendezvous and docking control problem between two six-degrees-of-freedom (six-DOF) spacecrafts based on dual quaternions. Firstly, Dual quaternions are used to describe the six-DOF kinematic and dynamic models about the relative translational motion and rotational motion of the two Spacecraft. Then, a novel terminal sliding mode and based fixed-time control strategy is proposed for spacecrafts to achieve the fast rendezvous and docking(RVD). Though the Lyapunov stability analysis, the closed-loop system is proved to be fixed-time stable and the state errors are guaranteed to converge to a small region containing the origin in fixed time. Finally, the effective performance of the proposed scheme is verified by the numerical simulation results.