Design and Validation of Novel Teleoperation Rendezvous and Docking System

Abstract

Teleoperation rendezvous and docking (RVD) can be used as a supporting technology for unmanned spacecrafts, or as a technology to dock the chaser with a noncooperative target. Teleoperation RVD has attracted little attention in the scientific community in the past according to a literature survey, while it is of application significance to China’s space station project. This paper outlines the concept design of a novel teleoperation RVD system as well as the controller. Experiments to verify the feasibility of the novel concept design focus on the communication bandwidth, the impact of time delay within the control loop, and a predictive display approach to reduce the impact of time delay. The results show that the chaser is controllable even though the time delay is as large as 6 s during ground-based teleoperating closed-loop control, i.e., the newly designed system is feasible. In addition, the control approach based on predictive display demonstrates an increase in effectiveness within teleoperation RVD. Experimental results indicate that the success rate of this approach increases by 14% compared to the traditional approach that uses only visual feedbacks.