Given the increasingly dense environment in both low-earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO), a sudden
change in the trajectory of any existing resident space object (RSO) may cause potential collision damage
to space assets. With a constellation of electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensor platforms and ground radar
surveillance systems, it is important to design optimal estimation algorithms for updating nonlinear object
states and allocating sensing resources to effectively avoid collisions among many RSOs. Previous work on
RSO collision avoidance often assumes that the maneuver onset time or maneuver motion of the space object
is random and the sensor management approach is designed to achieve efficient average coverage of the RSOs.
Few attempts have included the inference of an object's intent in the response to an RSO's orbital change.
We propose a game theoretic model for sensor selection and assume the worst case intentional collision of an
object's orbital change. The intentional collision results from maximal exposure of an RSO's path. The resulting
sensor management scheme achieves robust and realistic collision assessment, alerts the impending collisions,
and identifies early RSO orbital change with lethal maneuvers. We also consider information sharing among
distributed sensors for collision alert and an object's intent identification when an orbital change has been
declared. We compare our scheme with the conventional (non-game based) sensor management (SM) scheme
using a LEO-to-LEO space surveillance scenario where both the observers and the unannounced and unplanned
objects have complete information on the constellation of vulnerable assets. We demonstrate that, with adequate
information sharing, the distributed SM method can achieve the performance close to that of centralized SM in
identifying unannounced objects and making early warnings to the RSO for potential collision to ensure a proper
selection of collision avoidance action.
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