Experimental Demonstration of an Adaptive, Attitude-Constrained Guidance Framework for Safe Docking on a Floating Satellite Platform

This article presents an experimental demonstration of an attitude-constrained adaptive guidance and control framework for safe autonomous docking, evaluated using a planar floating satellite platform testbed. The proposed approach combines a jerk-minimizing explicit guidance law, which enforces terminal constraints on position, velocity, and acceleration, with an adaptive tracking controller designed to handle modeling uncertainties, actuator limitations, and external disturbances. The guidance strategy generates a smooth, real-time trajectory for the chaser satellite, ensuring compatibility with limited onboard computation and maintaining high terminal accuracy. To ensure safe operation throughout the docking maneuver, a barrier-Lyapunov-based adaptive controller is augmented that imposes state constraints to enforce strict adherence to the desired trajectory with predefined nominal bounds. By virtue of the constraint, the tracking error is bounded within a pre-defined bound. The bound is not time-varying because the reference trajectory is designed to begin from the current state of the robot with minimum jerk. The complete framework is demonstrated through hardware-in-the-loop experiments using a planar floating satellite platform and a prototype docking station. Experimental results corroborate the efficacy of autonomously achieving docking while satisfying stringent terminal constraints on position, velocity, and orientation, demonstrating the framework’s robustness and practical applicability to on-orbit servicing missions.