A Composite Robust Fault-Tolerant Control Scheme for Limited-Thrust Spacecraft Rendezvous in Near-Circular Orbits

External perturbations and actuator faults are two practical and significant issues that deserve designers' considerations when synthesizing the controllers for spacecraft rendezvous. A composite robust fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme that does not require the fault information is proposed in this paper for limited-thrust rendezvous in near-circular orbits. Within the control scheme, a reliable integral sliding mode (ISM) auxiliary controller and a modified guaranteed cost FTC are, respectively, developed to attenuate the external disturbances and to stabilize the nominal rendezvous system with actuator faults. Comparisons with previous works as well as a more practical and challenging simulation example are presented to verify the advantages of this composite control scheme.