Spacecraft autonomous attitude maneuver control by potential function method

This article investigates the spacecraft autonomous attitude maneuver control in the presence of forbidden attitude. First, the dynamical and kinematic equations are introduced, in which a quaternion is adopted to represent the attitude deviation between the spacecraft attitude and maneuver or the forbidden attitude, with the corresponding Euler rotation angles describing the distance of various attitudes. Second, in order to avoid the forbidden attitude, the existence conditions for the repulsive potential function (RPF) are exploited by incorporating the spacecraft motions, and a novel RPF is proposed according to the minimum separation angle allowed for the forbidden attitude. The RPF as well as the attractive potential function (APF) are employed subsequently to derive a virtual angular velocity command. An autonomous attitude maneuver controller is obtained by means of backstepping. Meanwhile, some self-adaptive rules for the control parameters are developed to deal with control saturation. In addition, one switch controller is proposed to overcome the local minima of the potential function. Finally, numerical results for different forbidden attitude regions are presented to show the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method.