Time-optimal reorientation for rigid satellite with reaction wheels

This article introduces a time-optimal reorientation manoeuvre controller with saturation constraints on both reaction wheels’ torques and angular momentum. The proposed control scheme consists of two parts. The first part is an open-loop time-minimum reorientation trajectory generated by the Legendre pseudospectral method. Actuator dynamics, saturations on control torques and angular momentums of reaction wheels are taken into account in generating the open-loop optimal trajectory. The second part is a closed-loop tracking control law to track the optimised reference trajectory based on attitude error dynamics with reaction wheel dynamics. Numerical simulations show that reaction wheel dynamics play an important role in attitude manoeuvres. The proposed controller performs better for rest-to-rest reorientation manoeuvre than other existing methods.