LAUSR

Teleoperation rendezvous and docking can be used as a supporting technology for unmanned spacecraft. An attempt to apply this technology to an unmanned spacecraft’s fly-around maneuver in a space station-based rendezvous and docking task is described in this paper; relative navigation (state determination) strategies and manual steering strategies are proposed sequentially. Parameters to delineate the relative motion states between spacecraft were specifically defined, and an estimation strategy for the parameter set was designed based on the configured relative measurement sensors. Then, manual steering strategies, characterized by decoupling control of the line-of-sight (LOS) orientation between the unmanned spacecraft and the relative orbit motion, were developed to ensure that the unmanned spacecraft, piloted by operators on the space station, flies with almost invariant radial velocity and angular velocity in the LOS axis. A human-in-the-loop simulation result demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the strategies proposed.