Autonomous attitude maneuver planning for spacecraft under complex constraints

For spacecraft suffering from multiple celestial constraints in time-varying space environment, along with intrinsic dynamics constraints, an on-board attitude maneuver planning was studied. The full attitude was mapped to a point described in three-dimensional attitude space. The attitude path planning was then transformed to sequent plannings of intermediate nodes. A set of nodes were randomly searched in the attitude space. For the Euler rotation between two adjacent nodes, an attitude guidance law with built-in dynamics constraints drove the motion, and the geometry constraints were checked. A feasible path was found using rapidly exploring random trees, and was subsequently optimized utilizing features of the attitude space. Simulations show that the algorithm can rapidly find a valid path in large-scale space, and the optimization procedure aids to reduce the maneuver time-span. The discrete node planning guarantees availability of valid solution, and exhibits probabilistic completeness.