Potential approach for constrained autonomous manoeuvres of a spacecraft equipped with a cluster of control moment gyroscopes

A potential function approach for attitude manoeuvres in the presence of constraints on admissible attitudes is implemented for a spacecraft controlled by a cluster of control moment gyroscopes. An angular velocity command derived from the potential function defined in the quaternion error vector space is directly implemented by means of a gimbal position command generation algorithm. The manoeuvre is performed by tracking the maximum angular momentum component, corresponding to the commanded angular velocity parallel to the eigenaxis that takes the spacecraft directly onto the desired final attitude. Corrections to the resulting desired angular velocity are implemented if the attitude gets close to one of the forbidden attitudes (‘obstacles’), represented by peaks of the Lyapunov function in the attitude space. Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the validity of the approach and to compare the overall performance with results reported in the literature.