CEAS EuroGNC 2026
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Cascaded Control Barrier Function Method for Safe Spacecraft Rendezvous
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| Jonghyun Woo |
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea | | Yeongho Kim |
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea | | Namhoon Cho |
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea | | Seokwon Lee |
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea |
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| Abstract:
Safe spacecraft rendezvous requires the chaser to satisfy stringent path constraints during proximity operations while preserving convergence to the docking state. Although high-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) provide a systematic way to enforce safety, their monolithic constraint at the final control input level can lead to boundary riding behavior and degraded transient performance in path constrained rendezvous scenarios. This paper proposes a cascaded control barrier function (CCBF) framework for safe spacecraft rendezvous. By decomposing the safety constraint into sequential cascade layers, the proposed approach enforces safety consistency from the virtual control level to the actual force input, thereby improving design traceability and tuning tractability compared with conventional HOCBF formulations. The method is applied to satellite rendezvous scenarios subject to a semi-cubical cone path constraint, within a backstepping based sequential control Lyapunov function-quadratic programming (CLF-QP) architecture. Numerical simulation demonstrates that both HOCBF and the proposed CCBF maintain the prescribed safety corridor, whereas the proposed CCBF yields smoother and faster convergence to the docking region with reduced boundary-riding behavior under the same path constraint.
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| Keywords: Control Barrier Function; Spacecraft Rendezvous; Cascaded Control; Safety-Critical Control |
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2026-044 doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-044 |
| Jonghyun Woo, Yeongho Kim, Namhoon Cho, Seokwon Lee: Cascaded Control Barrier Function Method for Safe Spacecraft Rendezvous. Proceedings of the 2026 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Madrid, Spain. May 2026. doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-044.
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| BibTeX entry (UTF-8):
@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2026-044,
author = {Woo, Jonghyun and Kim, Yeongho and Cho, Namhoon and Lee, Seokwon},
title = {Cascaded Control Barrier Function Method for Safe Spacecraft Rendezvous},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
address = {Madrid, Spain},
month = may,
year = {2026},
doi = {10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-044}
}
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