Relative position coordinated control for spacecraft formation flying with obstacle/collision avoidance

The problem of the relative position coordinated control for spacecraft formation flying with a leader spacecraft under the obstacle environment is the focus of this paper. To avoid obstacle/collision and maintain the formation configuration, the Null-Space-Based behavioral control architecture is built by defining the priorities of the basic tasks and computing the corresponding velocity vectors. Through the null-space projection, the desired velocity of each follower spacecraft can be calculated by merging the basic tasks. Moreover, due to the partial access to the dynamic leader spacecraft’s states, the distributed estimators are presented for each follower spacecraft. Then, based on the desired velocity, the adaptive coordinated tracking control algorithm incorporated with the barrier Lyapunov function is designed such that the states satisfy the time-varying constraints, even subject to uncertainties and unknown disturbances. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to illustrate the main results.