Time-optimal maneuvering control of a rigid spacecraft

The time-optimal rest-to-rest maneuvering control problem of a rigid spacecraft is studied in this paper. By utilizing an iterative procedure, this problem is formulated and solved as a constrained nonlinear programming (NLP) one. In this novel method, the count of control steps is fixed initially and the sampling period is treated as a variable in the optimization process. The optimization object is to minimize the sampling period below a specific minimum value, which is set in advance considering the accuracy of discretization. To generate initial feasible solutions of the NLP problem, a genetic-algorithm-based is also proposed such that the optimization process can be started from many different points to find the globally optimal solution. With the proposed method, one can find a time-optimal rest-to-rest maneuver of the rigid spacecraft between two attitudes. To show the feasibility of the proposed method, simulation results are included for illustration. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.