Orbital Evasive Target Tracking and Sensor Management

In this chapter, we consider the sensor management problem for tracking space targets where the targets may apply evasive maneuvering strategy to avoid being tracked by the space borne observers. We first study the case of single target tracking by a single observer and formulate the pursuit–evasion game with complete information. Then we extend the tracking problem to a set of collaborative observers and each observer has to decide when to sense which target in order to achieve the desired estimation error covariance. A popularly used criterion for sensor management is to maximize the total information gain in the observer-to-target assignment. We compare the information based approach to the game theoretic criterion where the observers are assigned according to the best response of the terminal result in the pursuit–evasion game. Finally, we use realistic satellite orbits to simulate the space resource management for situation awareness. We adopted NASA’s General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) for space target tracking with multiple space borne observers. The results indicate that the game theoretic approach is more effective than the information based approach in handling intelligent target maneuvers.