Minimal energy maneuvering control of a rigid spacecraft with momentum transfer

The main goal of this study is to investigate a minimal energy rest-to-rest maneuvering control problem with open final time of a rigid spacecraft actuated by three orthogonal momentum wheels. Different from conventional shooting methods, this control problem is formulated and solved as a constrained nonlinear programming (NLP) one by utilizing an iterative procedure. 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. An approach to find the initial feasible solutions of the NLP problem is also proposed. Since initial feasible solutions can be found easily, the optimization process of the NLP problem can be started from different points to find the minimal energy 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.