{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-convex-formulation-of-the-soft-capture","title":"A Convex Formulation of the Soft-Capture Problem","arxiv_id":"2405.00867","date":"2024-05-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ibrahima Sory Sow","Geordan Gutow","Howie Choset","Zachary Manchester"],"abstract":"We present a fast trajectory optimization algorithm for the soft capture of uncooperative tumbling space objects. Our algorithm generates safe, dynamically feasible, and minimum-fuel trajectories for a six-degree-of-freedom servicing spacecraft to achieve soft capture (near-zero relative velocity at contact) between predefined locations on the servicer spacecraft and target body. We solve a convex problem by enforcing a convex relaxation of the field-of-view constraint, followed by a sequential convex program correcting the trajectory for collision avoidance. The optimization problems can be solved with a standard second-order cone programming solver, making the algorithm both fast and practical for implementation in flight software. We demonstrate the performance and robustness of our algorithm in simulation over a range of object tumble rates up to 10{\\deg}/s.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00867v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.00867v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-convex-formulation-of-the-soft-capture","repo_url":"https://github.com/roboticexplorationlab/softcapture","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}