Safe motion planning for spacecraft formation reconfiguration based on high-order control barrier function

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed motion planning framework for safely reconfiguring spacecraft formations to desired configurations. A control Lyapunov function based guidance strategy is developed to guarantee convergence while satisfying control rate constraints. To ensure collision avoidance during maneuvering, a high-order control barrier function based approach is integrated to impose safety constraints between spacecraft. Actuator saturation is explicitly handled by incorporating output constraints into the control design. The overall guidance and planning problem is formulated as a constrained quadratic programming problem, which yields optimal, collision-free trajectories in real time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method enables safe and efficient formation reconfiguration without compromising convergence or violating actuator limits.