Hamilton--Jacobi Reachability for Spacecraft Collision Avoidance

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hui, Larry, Kam, Jordan, Su, William, Zhou, Jianshu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Hui, Larry
Kam, Jordan
Su, William
Zhou, Jianshu
author_facet Hui, Larry
Kam, Jordan
Su, William
Zhou, Jianshu
contents This article presents a Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability framework for a two--satellite collision avoidance problem operating in the same circular orbit, where relative motion is modeled in the radial--tangential--normal (RTN) frame using planar Hill--Clohessy--Wiltshire (HCW) dynamics. We define the target state space as unsafe relative configurations in the orbit plane corresponding to minimum separation requirements consistent with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) orbital standards. The interaction between spacecraft is formulated as a zero--sum differential game, where Player 1 is the controlled satellite and Player 2 is modeled as a bounded adversarial disturbance with unknown intent. We present the HJ formulation and compute backward reachable sets that characterize relative states from which collision cannot be avoided under worst-case disturbances, while states outside this set admit provably collision-free trajectories. These reachable sets are integrated with supervisory hybrid control logic to determine when evasive maneuvers must be initiated, enabling mathematically grounded safety guarantees for scalability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_20138
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hamilton--Jacobi Reachability for Spacecraft Collision Avoidance
Hui, Larry
Kam, Jordan
Su, William
Zhou, Jianshu
Robotics
Systems and Control
This article presents a Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability framework for a two--satellite collision avoidance problem operating in the same circular orbit, where relative motion is modeled in the radial--tangential--normal (RTN) frame using planar Hill--Clohessy--Wiltshire (HCW) dynamics. We define the target state space as unsafe relative configurations in the orbit plane corresponding to minimum separation requirements consistent with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) orbital standards. The interaction between spacecraft is formulated as a zero--sum differential game, where Player 1 is the controlled satellite and Player 2 is modeled as a bounded adversarial disturbance with unknown intent. We present the HJ formulation and compute backward reachable sets that characterize relative states from which collision cannot be avoided under worst-case disturbances, while states outside this set admit provably collision-free trajectories. These reachable sets are integrated with supervisory hybrid control logic to determine when evasive maneuvers must be initiated, enabling mathematically grounded safety guarantees for scalability.
title Hamilton--Jacobi Reachability for Spacecraft Collision Avoidance
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20138