Minimum Time Control of Flexible Spacecraft by Hamilton's Principle

Modern space vehicles structure requisites are getting more and more stringent and complex as mission tasks become more sophisticated. This leads to the necessity of developing analysis methods that take into account structure flexibility and the need of reducing manoeuvre time as much as possible. In this work, a method based on the Hamilton Principle in its weak mixed form is developed, in which co-ordinates derivatives do not appear, but only their virtual variations. The proposed formulation is able to take into account system flexibility and saturation constraints on control torques and forces. A non-linear variational condition is obtained, which can be solved by means of a time-finite-element technique to give the minimum-time solutions of the control problem. The solutions for slewing manoeuvres are given, along with a new solution of the distributed optimal control problem.