Spacecraft Maneuver Detection via a Confidence-Dominance Maneuver Indicator

Accurate and efficient maneuver detection is critical for ensuring the safety and predictability of spacecraft trajectories. This paper presents a maneuver detection approach based on comparing the confidence levels associated with the orbital state estimation and the observation likelihood. First, a confidence dominance maneuver indicator (CDMI) is proposed by setting a confidence level for the state estimation and computing the maximum likelihood of the observation and its confidence level. The CDMI then flags a maneuver when the observation's confidence level exceeds that of the state estimation, indicating that the observation is unlikely under the no-maneuver hypothesis while maintaining consistency with the prior state estimation confidence. To efficiently compute the maximum likelihood of the observation and obtain the CDMI, a recursive polynomial optimization method is developed, taking advantage of convex optimization and polynomial approximation. In addition, an integrated CDMI approach is developed to eliminate the need to manually select the state confidence level. The integrated CDMI approach maintains high detection accuracy while simultaneously providing an indication of maneuver likelihood, thereby enhancing robustness and practical applicability. The performance of the proposed CDMI-based maneuver detection approaches is evaluated against an optimal control distance metric and two mixture-based approaches in cislunar impulsive-maneuver detection scenarios. In simulations, the proposed integrated CDMI achieves at least 10% improvement in detection accuracy over competing methods while substantially reducing computational cost.