Energy-optimized attitude planning for spacecraft with movable parts using auxiliary rotation

Attitude planning is required for spacecraft with movable parts to allow the pointing of the movable sensor to avoid strong light celestial bodies. For the orbiter in the shadow region or deep space probe, it is important to consider the optimization of energy consumption in attitude planning because of energy limitations. Nevertheless, prior approaches to attitude planning for spacecraft with movable parts rely on deterministic decoupled strategies, which minimize body rotations solely from a geometric standpoint. We provide an energy-optimized decoupled strategy based on Differential Evolution (DE) to deal with this problem. This strategy introduces a new auxiliary rotation vector as the individual vector for optimization, transforming attitude maneuver sequences with minimal geometric rotation into sequences optimized for energy consumption. Furthermore, the fitness function is tailored to the Polynomial Attitude Trajectory Planning (PATP) and Decoupled Attitude Trajectory Planning (DATP) approaches in order to estimate energy consumption, which is refined throughout the evolutionary process. Simulation results indicate the suggested method's energy optimization effect and ability to handle complex constraints.