Optimal motion planning of an underactuated spacecraft using wavelet approximate method

Abstract

Abstract An optimal motion planning scheme using vavelet approximation is proposed for an underactuated spacecraft. The motion planning of an underactuated spacecraft can be formulated as an optimal control of a drift-free system. A cost functional is used to incorporate the control energy and the final state errors. The motion planning is to determine control inputs to minimize the cost functional. Using the method of wavelet, one can transform an infinte-dimensional optimal control problem to a finite-dimensinal one and use Gauss-Newton algorithm to solve it for a feasible trajectory which satisfies nonholonomic constraints. The proposed scheme has been applied to a rigid spacecraft with two momentum wheels. The numerical simulation results indicate that optimal control with wavelet approximation is an effective approach to steering an underactuated spacecraft system from the initial configuration to the final configuration. *Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 10372014)