Manoeuvres of spacecraft with flexible appendage in obstacle environment

Abstract

This paper presents a collision avoidance control scheme for position and large angle manoeuvres of spacecraft with flexible appendage in obstacle environment. Firstly, the method of Lagrange equation is used to model the spacecraft with beam-type appendage. Secondly, independent position and attitude controllers are designed by only using the state of spacecraft as feedback information, without any need to measure the elastic deformation of the beam-type appendage. And then, collision avoidance based on real-time distance information is achieved by applying additional artificial repulsive force and torque to the spacecraft. Bounding boxes in the form of superquadric surfaces are exploited to compute the distance between bodies, and the scheme accounts for not only the geometric shape of the obstacle but also that of the spacecraft with flexible appendage. Finally, the effectiveness of proposed control scheme is demonstrated by numerical case studies.