Distributed Control Method for Vehicle Cooperative Rendezvous

Cooperative rendezvous/docking is an enabling technology for future autonomous missions. However, it is still a challenge to design a fully distributed, stability-guaranteed control method for cooperative rendezvous. To address this issue, this paper proposes a distributed control method for an unmanned vehicle cooperative rendezvous mission. First, the cooperative rendezvous process is formulated as an optimal control problem. To decentralize the control framework, a rendezvous parameter is introduced, and the rendezvous parameter optimization algorithm is designed to guarantee the terminal rendezvous of autonomous vehicles while improving the system performance. On this basis, a distributed control framework, based on rendezvous parameter optimization, generates the control commands to achieve cooperative rendezvous. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control approach through three simulations.