A Practical Path Planning and Control Method for Move-to-Move Attitude Maneuvers

This paper is concerned with the attitude maneuver control problem of spacecraft with move-to-move boundary constraints, i.e., non-zero angular displacements and non-zero angular velocities. A novel planning and control scenario is proposed via modeling the maneuver as a rest-to-rest reorientation motion superposed with a relative motion, which gives rise to an easier and more straightforward way to yield an analytical move-to-move maneuver path. The fixed Euler-axis-based trajectory planning method is exploited in the rest-to-rest reorientation motion provided that the angular displacement is satisfied.For the relative motion, a cost functional-based optimization technique is developed, where the integral variables include the relative attitude and its time-derivatives, to generate an action-minimum path fulfilling the angular velocity conditions. The expected attitude is integrated by these two planned maneuver motions, by which the 3-axis reference angles, angular velocities, and compensational torques are derived for the feedback and feedforward control. Finally, numerical simulations including series of move-to-move maneuvers are provided to validate the proposed theoretical method.