Shared Control of Teleoperation Rendezvous and Docking in Lunar Orbit

Abstract

Teleoperation rendezvous and docking (RVD) in the lunar orbit may not reach the required RVD accuracy because of the inherent time delay in the communication link and the measurement error. To solve this problem, the shared control strategy for teleoperation RVD based on the potential field function was studied in this work. On the basis of the relative dynamic equations, a predictive display model to depict the predictive ability of the operator was established to overcome the time delay effect. The automatic mode was designed based on the potential field function, which regarded the relative distance and speed with respect to the safe corridor as reference quantities. In addition, this article outlines the concept of shared control weighting coefficient and its derivation on the basis of the influencing factors. Finally, a validation experiment was conducted on a nine-degree teleoperation RVD simulator. Results showed that the shared control method can overcome the influence of time delay in the communication loop and effectively improve the RVD accuracy compared with manual and automatic control modes. The control performance and success probability of RVD tasks were also enhanced.