Imitation learning-based spacecraft rendezvous and docking method with Expert Demonstration

TL;DR

This paper introduces an imitation learning framework for spacecraft rendezvous and docking that learns control policies directly from expert demonstrations, improving robustness and reducing reliance on precise dynamic models.

Contribution

It proposes an anchored decoder mechanism and a temporal aggregation strategy to enhance control reliability and stability in a model-free, learning-based approach.

Findings

Achieves accurate and energy-efficient rendezvous and docking control.

Maintains performance under significant unknown disturbances.

Demonstrates robustness and reliability in simulations.

Abstract

Existing spacecraft rendezvous and docking control methods largely rely on predefined dynamic models and often exhibit limited robustness in realistic on-orbit environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Imitation Learning-based spacecraft rendezvous and docking control framework (IL-SRD) that directly learns control policies from expert demonstrations, thereby reducing dependence on accurate modeling. We propose an anchored decoder target mechanism, which conditions the decoder queries on state-related anchors to explicitly constrain the control generation process. This mechanism enforces physically consistent control evolution and effectively suppresses implausible action deviations in sequential prediction, enabling reliable six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) rendezvous and docking control. To further enhance stability, a temporal aggregation mechanism is incorporated to mitigate error accumulation caused by the sequential prediction nature of Transformer-based models, where small inaccuracies at each time step can propagate and amplify over long horizons. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IL-SRD framework achieves accurate and energy-efficient model-free rendezvous and docking control. Robustness evaluations further confirm its capability to maintain competitive performance under significant unknown disturbances. The source code is available at https://github.com/Dongzhou-1996/IL-SRD.