Cooperative autonomous obstacle avoidance control of spacecraft cluster via event-triggered reference governors

This paper conducts research on the design of a cooperative obstacle avoidance control mechanism for spacecraft cluster. It proposes an event-triggered reverse command regulator to address the current unidirectional obstacle avoidance mechanism, which only goes from the cluster reference command to the individual execution of spacecraft. The proposed mechanism enhances the survivability of spacecraft cluster in complex environments. By employing the designed event-triggered command regulator, the spacecraft can autonomously decide whether to execute a leader-following task based on whether the tracking error satisfies the performance requirements of the cluster closed-loop system. This allows the spacecraft to dynamically choose between task execution and temporarily “forgetting” the task to focus on collision avoidance, thereby increasing the collaborative flexibility of the spacecraft cluster. Furthermore, based on Lyapunov stability theory, the convergence of the proposed cooperative obstacle avoidance control algorithm is theoretically proven. Ultimately, simulation results demonstrate the real-time effectiveness of the designed cooperative obstacle avoidance solution.