Autonomous Avoidance Mission Planning for Spacecrafts Confronting Orbital Threats With Flexible Durations and Resource Demands

This article studies the mission planning method of autonomous avoidance for spacecrafts subject to orbital threats. First, considering the flexible resource demands and the durations of action in threat avoidance, a mission planning model with flexible parameters (FPs) is established for autonomous avoidance of spacecrafts, in which the FPs represent the physical variables to be selected. In the forward search, the ordering choices are used to handle various constraints, and the consistency of the state is verified by the linear programming to solve the boundary conditions of durations and resources. Then, the flexible planning strategy is proposed to calculate the specific values of each FP in the interval at the later stage of the planning. The temporal relaxed planning graph heuristics is then employed for searching from the initial state to the goal state. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness and advantages for spacecrafts on the autonomous avoidance of orbital threats, and the comparative results show that the proposed algorithm can utilize 2.85% of the average runtimes in the existing algorithm while improving the average plan quality by 9.26%.