Semi-Decentralized Multi-Spacecraft Collision Avoidance under Communication Constraints

Abstract

Current spacecraft collision-avoidance operations rely on intermittent ground-station contacts, requiring operators to plan with delayed and asynchronously updated information. Consequently, maneuvers must be planned with only intermittent information sharing between operators, raising the question of how much coordination is needed to achieve collision-avoidance performance comparable to centralized planning. Although decision-theoretic approaches such as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) capture the sequential and uncertain nature of collision avoidance, existing multiagent extensions typically assume either continuous information sharing or communication models that do not reflect operational ground-station constraints. To explicitly model this intermittent information availability, we formulate the spacecraft-to-spacecraft collision avoidance problem as a semi-decentralized POMDP (SDec-POMDP), where we govern information propagation directly by realistic ground-station visibility windows. Joint maneuver policies are computed using approximate Recursive Small-Step Semi-Decentralized A* (RS-SDA*), following the state-of-the-art A*-based lineage for decentralized multiagent planning. Across a representative suite of conjunction scenarios, semi-decentralized planning recovers near-centralized maneuver quality while requiring 28.5% fewer synchronization events than continuous coordination. Comparisons with representative rule-based operator heuristics further show that communication-aware planning more consistently achieves the desired operational miss-distance band while minimizing unnecessary trajectory deviation. Together, these results establish a practical planning framework for autonomous collision avoidance under realistic intermittent communication, bridging the gap between idealized centralized coordination and fully decentralized planning execution.