Capturing a Non-Cooperative Resident Space Object: A Control Barrier Function Approach

Control barrier functions are commonly used for providing safety guarantees to a controlled dynamical system, such as a guarantee of collision avoidance. This work leverages the recent advancements in multiple higher-order control barrier functions to develop a control strategy for a free-flying space manipulator system (SMS) with an arbitrary number of redundant manipulator arms to capture a non-cooperative resident space object (RSO). The impact of this result is a real-time controller capable of being used on a computationally constrained system while satisfying several safety constraints necessary for the approach, synchronization, and capture of the RSO.