Title: Safe Trajectories for Autonomous Rendezvous of Spacecraft
Abstract: ight experiments suggest that safety considerations will play an important role in the success of future missions. This paper presents a method for online generation of safe, fuel-optimized rendezvous trajectories that guarantee collision avoidance for a large class of anomalous system behaviors. We examine the cost of imposing safety as a problem constraint and of additional constraints that guarantee innite horizon passive collision avoidance while enabling future docking retries. Tradeos between passive and active approaches to safety are examined. A convex formulation of the collision avoidance algorithm is introduced and shown to provide much faster solutions with only a small additional fuel expense. Numerous examples using both rotating and nonrotating targets are presented to demonstrate the overall benets of incorporating these safety constraints when compared to nominal trajectory design techniques.