AAS 95-318

Minimum Time Fuel Efficient Maneuver of Flexible Spacecraft with Vibration Amplitude Constraint

A. K. Banerjee, Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA, W. Singhose, Dept of Mechanical Engr. MIT, Cambridge, MA

Abstract

This paper describes an on-off control scheme for fuel efficient, minimum time maneuver of flexible spacecraft with vibration suppression. The method minimizes the slewing time subject to the constraints of zero residual vibration, maximum insensitivity to frequency errors in the model, rest-to-rest slewing, and a prescribed bound on maximum transient vibration amplitude. Coasting periods between thruster pulses provides fuel efficiency to the control. Plots of slewing times vs slewing angles, and of control insensitivity vs model frequency are given. Applied to slewing of a shuttle/antenna system in which the antenna can undergo large elastic deformation, it is shown that the method extends itself very well to nonlinear systems.