Guidance for Autonomous Inspection of Unknown Uncooperative Resident Space Object

In recent years, space debris has become an imminent and growing problem for space operations around Earth. Consequently, active debris removal and satellite servicing missions have gained increasing attention. For such scenarios, the chaser must operate autonomously in the vicinity of a non-cooperative unknown target. This paper presents a sampling-based receding-horizon motion planning algorithm that selects inspection maneuvers, while taking many complex constraints into account. The proposed guidance solution is compared with classical approaches and it is shown to take advantage of the characteristics of the natural dynamics of the relative motion to outperform them.