Spacecraft on-orbital services and docking require their autonomous rendezvous control system to have obstacle avoidance capability. Motivated by this, a suboptimal velocity artificial potential function-based control scheme is presented. An ellipsoid model is applied to describe the outer envelopes of the service spacecraft and the obstacles via an eigenvalue algorithm. This has better description precision than the traditional methods. The potential sigmoid function is used to generate repulsive force to avoid obstacles collision. A velocity artificial potential function-based controller is finally developed to ensure that the relative speed of the service spacecraft is reduced to zero before reaching the outer envelops of obstacles. The shaping parameters of the attractive potential function are adaptively optimized. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate that the approach can achieve a safe and autonomous rendezvous with fuel cost saved.
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