Revolution-Spaced Output-Feedback Model Predictive Control for Station Keeping on Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel model predictive control policy for station keeping on Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbits, ensuring full-state tracking with multiple spaced maneuvers, and demonstrates its effectiveness over existing methods.

Contribution

The paper develops a recursive feasible MPC policy with multiple-revolution spaced maneuvers for station keeping on NRHOs, improving over existing algorithms.

Findings

Successfully maintains spacecraft near reference NRHO

Comparable cumulative cost to existing methods

Avoids phase deviation issues common in prior approaches

Abstract

We develop a model predictive control (MPC) policy for station keeping on a Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO). The proposed policy achieves full-state tracking of a reference NRHO via a multiple-maneuver control horizon, each spaced one revolution apart to abide by typical mission operation requirements. We prove that the proposed policy is recursively feasible, and perform numerical evaluation in an output-feedback setting by incorporating a navigation filter and realistic operational uncertainties, where the proposed MPC is compared against the state-of-the-art station-keeping algorithm adopted for the Gateway. Our approach successfully maintains the spacecraft in the vicinity of the reference NRHO at a similar cumulative cost as existing station-keeping methods without encountering phase deviation issues, a common drawback of existing methods with one maneuver per revolution.