Adaptive sliding mode control of cooperative spacecraft rendezvous with coupled uncertain dynamics

Pose tracking control of cooperative spacecraft rendezvous and docking systems subject to coupled and uncertain dynamics is studied in this paper. An adaptive sliding mode trajectory tracking controller is proposed to ensure asymptotic convergence of pose tracking errors and adaptive estimations in Lyapunov framework. An adaptation scheme of the controller gain is derived via Lyapunov redesign method to improve the control performance of the closed-loop system. Sliding mode control guarantees the robustness for dealing with parametric uncertainty and external disturbance. The boundary-layer technique is employed to overcome control chattering phenomenon. A numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed controller.