Passively safe configuration design for spacecraft swarm flying with boundary constraints

This paper investigates the configuration design associated with boundary-constrained swarm flying. An analytic swarm configuration is identified to ensure the passive safety between each pair of spacecraft in the radial-cross-track plane. For the first time, this work derives the explicit configurable spacecraft amount to clarify the configuration’s accommodation capacity while considering the maximum inter-spacecraft separation constraint. For larger-scale design problem that involves hundreds of spacecraft, this paper proposes an optimization framework that integrates a Relative Orbit Element (ROE) affine transformation operation and successional convex optimization. The framework establishes a multi-subcluster swarm structure, allowing decoupling the maintenance issues of each subcluster. Compared with previous design methods, it ensures that the computational cost for constraints verification only scales linearly with the swarm size, while also preserving the configuration optimization capacities. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed analytic configuration strictly meets the design constraints. It is also shown that the proposed framework reduces the handled constraint amount by two orders compared with direct optimization, while achieving a remarkable swarm safety enhancement based on the existing analytic configuration.