Planning natural repointing manoeuvres for nano-spacecraft

In the work presented here the natural dynamics of a rigid body are exploited to plan attitude manoeuvres for a small spacecraft. By using the analytical solutions of the angular velocities and making use of Lax pair integration, the time evolution of the attitude of the spacecraft in a convenient quaternion form is derived. This enables repointing manoeuvres to be generated by optimising the free parameters of the analytical expressions, the initial angular velocities of the spacecraft, to match prescribed boundary conditions on the final attitude of the spacecraft. This produces reference motions that can be tracked using a simple proportional-derivative (PD) controller. The natural motions are compared in simulation with a conventional quaternion feedback controller and found to require lower accumulated torque. A simple obstacle avoidance algorithm, exploiting the analytic form of natural motions, is also described and implemented in simulation. The computational efficiency of the motion planning method is discussed.