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AerospaceAerospace
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  • Open Access

28 August 2026

31 Pages

A Space Non-Cooperative Target Rendezvous Orbit Prediction and Control Method Based on Active Disturbance Rejection

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1
Overall Design Department, Beijing Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Beijing 100854, China
2
Research Center for Space Optical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
3
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
This article belongs to the Section Astronautics & Space Science

Abstract

Aiming at the problems of strong model uncertainty, unmodeled perturbation disturbances and unknown maneuvering of space non-cooperative targets in orbital rendezvous missions, an orbit prediction and control method combining active disturbance rejection and model predictive control (ADRC-MPC) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the relative motion dynamic equations of chaser–target are established under a geocentric inertial coordinate system, and the lumped disturbance including space perturbation and unknown evasive maneuvers of the target is expanded into extended state variable. Secondly, an extended state observer (ESO) is designed to achieve real-time accurate estimation and feedforward compensation of time-varying lumped disturbances, which mitigates adverse influences induced by J2 zonal harmonics, atmospheric drag, solar radiation pressure, and target evasive maneuvers. Thirdly, a constrained MPC strategy incorporating thrust saturation, approach corridor, and collision safety zone constraints is developed. Sufficient conditions for closed-loop input-to-state stability (ISS) are theoretically derived via the small-gain theorem under the given assumptions, which ensures the uniform ultimate boundedness (UUB) of tracking errors. Finally, numerical simulations, comparative benchmarks against conventional MPC and proportional-derivative (PD) control, and Monte Carlo robustness tests are performed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ADRC-MPC framework delivers superior rendezvous precision, stronger disturbance rejection, reduced propellant consumption, and improved robustness against initial state offsets and measurement noises, laying solid theoretical and technical foundations for autonomous orbital rendezvous with space non-cooperative targets.

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