Behavior-Inspired Event-Triggered Control of Spacecraft Swarms for Autonomous Capture of Uncooperative Targets

Zixuan ZHANG; Zheng H. ZHU; Dan ZHANG

doi:10.1016/j.eng.2026.04.014

Engineering ›› :202604014 DOI: 10.1016/j.eng.2026.04.014

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Behavior-Inspired Event-Triggered Control of Spacecraft Swarms for Autonomous Capture of Uncooperative Targets

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Abstract

This paper presents an event-triggered behavior-inspired decentralized control framework for a spacecraft swarm tasked with capturing an unknown, uncooperative target. The proposed approach integrates local swarm behaviors, event-triggered communication and control, and distributed target perception within a unified architecture. Three local behaviors are considered: inter-agent collision avoidance, target buffering, and sensor-pointing alignment. To reduce communication burden, each agent updates and broadcasts its state only when predefined local triggering conditions are satisfied. Meanwhile, onboard sensing and neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange are used to estimate the target position, motion, and geometry without prior knowledge of the target shape. A graduated non-convexity-based perception module is adopted to improve the robustness of landmark-based target reconstruction under partial observability and noisy measurements. Numerical simulations for tumbling ellipsoidal targets demonstrate that the proposed method enables autonomous search, chase, and pre-capture enclosure while maintaining safe inter-agent spacing and reducing communication compared with periodic update strategies.

Keywords

Spacecraft swarm / Active debris removal / Event-triggered / Decentralized control / Autonomous / Distributed target perception / Uncooperative target

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Zixuan ZHANG, Zheng H. ZHU, Dan ZHANG. Behavior-Inspired Event-Triggered Control of Spacecraft Swarms for Autonomous Capture of Uncooperative Targets. Engineering 202604014 DOI:10.1016/j.eng.2026.04.014

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