Approach Planning and Guidance for Uncontrolled Rotating Satellite Capture Considering Collision Avoidance

The problem of planning safe kinematic approach trajectories for robotic capture of an uncontrolled rotating satellite is addressed, and two methods of trajectory planning are presented. The first method uses equations of orbital mechanics to plan a passive fly-by approach path for certain conditions of target satellite motion. The second method uses optimization techniques to plan an approach trajectory that is optimized with respect to a set of performance metrics. Results of these methods for representative scenarios are presented, and the relative merits of each method are discussed.