Abstract Multi-target sequential rendezvous presents an effective approach for enhancing the economic viability of on-orbit servicing while accommodating the management demands of large-scale space systems. Trajectory planning based on analytical models struggles to meet the requirements of high-precision sequential rendezvous missions. This paper proposes a homotopy-based stepwise optimization framework. Firstly, the approximate solution under the J 2 perturbation is obtained as the initial guess; Secondly, a homopoty-based local optimization is conducted to improve the maneuver parameters and obtain the high-precision trajectory. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an optimal approximate initial guess within 245 s, and then stably yields a high-precision solution with the near-optimal velocity increment through homotopy iterations.
Wang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.