NEAR MINIMUM-TIME 3-DIMENSIONAL MANEUVERS OF RIGID AND FLEXIBLE SPACECRAFT

An approach is presented to accomplish large angle, nonlinear, three dimensional attitude maneuvers in either near minimum-time or near minimum-fuel. The method permits the specification of a torque shaped reference maneuver of the near minimum-time (bang-bang) or near minimum-fuel (bang-off-bang) type; the instantaneous switches are replaced by controllably sharp spline switches to reduce excitation of flexible degrees of freedom. A Lyapunov method is used to design tracking-type control perturbations to suppress errors due to disturbances and model errors. The method is illustrated by numerical simulations and some experimental results using the ASTREX test article.

NEAR MINIMUM-TIME 3-DIMENSIONAL MANEUVERS OF RIGID AND FLEXIBLE SPACECRAFT Academic Article