Resumen
Rapid and accurate rendezvous and proximity operations for spacecraft are crucial to the success of most space missions. In this paper, a sequential convex programming method, combined with the first-order and second-order Birkhoff pseudospectral methods, is proposed for the autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations of spacecraft. The original nonlinear and nonconvex close-range rendezvous problem with thrust constraints and no-fly zone constraints is converted into its convex version by using the sequential convexification techniques; then, the Birkhoff pseudospectral method is used to transcribe the dynamic constraints into a series of linear algebraic equality constraints, in other words, a convex second-order conic programming problem with a relatively small condition number. Thus, the resulting problem can be accurately and efficiently solved by a convex solver. The simulation results indicate that the proposed methods, especially the second-order Birkhoff pseudospectral method, have obvious advantages over other methods in computational efficiency and sensitivity.