Safe Trajectories for Autonomous Rendezvous of Spacecraft

Autonomous spacecraft rendezvous is an enabling technology for many future space missions, but anomalies in recent flight experiments suggest that safety considerations will play a critical role in mission success. This paper presents a method for online generation of safe, fuel-optimized rendezvous trajectories that guarantee passive 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 infinite horizon passive collision avoidance while enabling future docking retries. A convex collision avoidance formulation was introduced and determined to provide computationally fast solutions at a small fuel expense. Several examples using both rotating and non-rotating targets are presented to demonstrate the overall benefits of incorporating these safety constraints when compared to nominal trajectory design techniques. I.