Large angular autonomous attitude maneuver of deep spacecraft using pseudospectral method

An autonomous large angular slew of deep spacecraft is studied, which is a key factor in the development of future spacecraft autonomous platform. The objective is to minimize some performance index and rotate the spacecraft to a desired attitude while subject to dynamic and geometric constraints. The investigated literature did not handle this problem very well either in performance or constraints consideration. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on pseudospectral method for autonomous attitude control, not only satisfies the nonconvex constraints but also optimizes performance. We approach this by two stages: (1) get the feasible path using RRT in Rodrigues space and (2) transform the optimal control problem to a nonlinear planning problem (NLP) utilizing Pseudospectral method. Finally, attitude path is obtained by solving the NLP with an initial value from (1). Simulation example is presented and discussed.