E-mail: xieyongchun@vip.sina.com;Prof. Yong-chun XIE, first author of this invited review pa- per, received her B.Sc. in the Department of Electronic Engi- neering from Tsinghua University in 1989, and received the master and PhD degrees in auto- matic control theory and appli- cation from Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, Chinese Academy of Space Technology, in 1991 and 1994, respectively. She is currently Vice Director of the Science and Technology Committee of Beijing Institute of Control Engineering. Prof. Xie has long been engaged in the study of theory, method, and application of spacecraft intelligent adaptive control. Since 2000, she has been respon- sible for the guidance, navigation, and control of rendezvous and docking, and Shenzhou manned spacecraft GNC system design. She took part in the on-orbit flight control of Shen- zhou #8, ~9, ~10, and their rendezvous and docking with Tiangong-1 spacecraft. She has made outstanding contribu- tions to the leaping development of Chinese autonomous ren- dezvous and docking technology. She has coauthored 1 book, published more than 90 articles, and won 8 national/defense invention patents. Prof. Xie is a member of the editorial committee for Journal of Astronautics and Aerospace Control and Application. Corresponding author