Attitude Maneuver Planning of Spacecraft with CMGs

Abstract

This paper proposes a new attitude maneuver planning method for a spacecraft equipped with control moment gyros (CMGs). By introducing the piecewise linear gimbal angular accelerations as designing parameters, a quasi-time-optimal attitude control is achieved by a rest-to-rest maneuver. A main advantage of the proposed method is to allow the restrictions for the magnitudes of the gimbal angular velocities and the gimbal angular accelerations due to mechanical constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical computations.