Energy optimal reconfiguration for large scale formation flying

An efficient method for energy optimal reconfiguration of formation flying involving multiple spacecraft is presented. The idea is to introduce a set of way-points through which the spacecraft are required to pass combined with certain parameterization of the trajectories. The resulting energy optimal with collision avoidance constraints problem is formulated as a parameter optimization problem in terms of the way-points parameters. A numerical algorithm is proposed and used for scenarios with multiple spacecraft.