Terminal spacecraft rendezvous and capture with LASSO model predictive control

The recently investigated `asso model predictive control (MPC) is applied to the terminal phase of a spacecraft rendezvous and capture mission. The interaction between the cost function and the treatment of minimum impulse bit (MIB) is also investigated. The propellant consumption with `asso MPC for the considered scenario is noticeably less than with a conventional quadratic cost and control actions are sparser in time. Propellant consumption and sparsity are competitive with those achieved using a zone-based `1 cost function, whilst requiring fewer decision variables in the optimisation problem than the latter. The `asso MPC is demonstrated to meet tighter specifications on control precision, and also avoids the risk of undesirable behaviours often associated with pure `1 stage costs.