Model Predictive Control of Spacecraft Relative Motion Maneuvers Using the IPA-SQP Approach

In this paper, a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) based on the Integrated Perturbation Analysis and Sequential Quadratic Programming (IPA-SQP) is designed and analyzed for spacecraft relative motion maneuvering. To evaluate the effectiveness of the IPA-SQP MPC, the results are compared with the linear quadratic MPC algorithm developed in [4, 13–15]. It is shown that the IPA-SQP algorithm can handle directly nonlinear constraints on thrust magnitude without resorting to saturation or polyhedral norm approximations. Spacecraft fuel consumption related metrics are examined for performance evaluation and comparison.