This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Yang, C.-C. Articles by Wu, C.-J. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Time-Optimal De-tumbling Control of a Rigid Spacecraft

Department of Electrical Engineering, Hsiuping Institute of Technology, Dali City, Taichung Country 41280, Taiwan, ROC, ccyang{at}mail.hit.edu.tw

Chia-Ju Wu

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Douliou, Yunlin 64002, Taiwan, ROC

The problem of time-optimal de-tumbling control (TODTC) of a rigid spacecraft moving between two attitudes is studied in this article. Unlike conventional approaches, which involve solving a set of differential equations, a novel numerical method is introduced. In the proposed method, by fixing the count of control steps and treating the sampling period as a variable, the TODTC problem is formulated as a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem by utilizing an iterative procedure. Generating initial feasible solutions systematically is also discussed, since these are usually needed in solving a NLP problem. In this manner, the optimization process of the NLP problem can be started from many different points when searching for the optimal solution. Simulation results are included, to show the feasibility of the proposed method.

Key Words: Time-optimal • de-tumbling control • rigid spacecraft • nonlinear programming.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?