Spacecraft attitude maneuver path iterative planning method under nonconvex quadratic constraints

The objective of this paper is to design an optimal attitude maneuver path for a rigid body spacecraft under complex constraints. Firstly, dynamics and kinematic constraints, bounded constraints and attitude pointing constraints are described and analyzed. Especially, the attitude pointing constraints are formulized as the nonconvex quadratic form; Secondly, the constrained attitude maneuver problem can be formulated as the nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programming with the target that the energy-cost is smallest; Then the linear relaxation technique is introduced, and the problem is converted into a bilinear programming problem, in which convex envelope and concave envelope of one variable can be obtained. By this theory the complexity of solving is reduced and a linear relaxation of the original problem can be obtained. Meanwhile, in order to improve the solution accuracy, an iterative planning algorithm based on evaluation function is presented in this paper. This algorithm makes the solution of linear relaxation as the initial value, and an optimal solution can be achieved by iteration ultimately. Simulation results show that this method not only meets the complex attitude constraints to give an optimal attitude maneuver path, but also reduces energy consumption.