Multiobjective planning for spacecraft reorientation under complex pointing constraints

Abstract

The spacecraft is required to optimize some performance indexes during the attitude maneuver in many space missions. Moreover, the presence of the bounded and pointing constraints will greatly reduce the feasible attitude space. It is difficult to solve the optimal spacecraft reorientation under complex multiple constraints. The notion of the rotational-path geometric-reasonableness is proposed to evaluate the quality of the maneuver path in terms of its geometric characteristics, which involve the path length and path unwinding in this paper. Considering the rotational-path geometric-reasonableness and energy consumption, this paper addresses the multiobjective spacecraft reorientation planning problem with constraints and proposes a new dynamic-iteration-based multiobjective planning (DIMP) method. Through the iterative quadratic programming approach with the dynamic termination criteria, the proposed method first generates a multiobjective suboptimal solution that does not consider the pointing constraints. Then the final solution under the keep-in and keep-out constraints is yielded via multiple rotational-path decomposition and iterative planning. Simulation results demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed method, which can obtain a high-quality and low-energy solution.