Pose Tracking and Formation Keeping Control of Spacecraft Formations under High-Order Control Barrier Functions

Aiming at the constraint issues of adjacent spacecraft solar panel collision avoidance and formation keeping in the pose tracking control of spacecraft formation, this paper proposes a distributed relative position and attitude cooperative control strategy on the basis of high-order control barrier functions. First, nominal control strategies for relative position and attitude tracking using the sliding mode control method to achieve high-precision tracking of relative motion are de-signed. Then, high-order control barrier functions suitable for solar panel collision avoidance and spacecraft formation keeping constraints are constructed. The control strategy constraints satisfying safety specifications are derived based on the forward invariant set theory. Finally, a quadratic programming optimization framework is established by combining the nominal control strategies and constraint conditions and then we obtain the optimal control strategy by solving this framework. Numerical simulations verify that the designed control scheme achieves precise tracking of relative position and attitude for spacecraft formation, avoids collisions between solar panels of adjacent spacecraft and prevents excessive loosening of the formation configuration.