The problem of time-optimal de-tumbling control (TODTC) of a rigid spacecraft moving between two attitudes is studied in this article. Unlike conventional approaches, which involve solving a set of differential equations, a novel numerical method is introduced. In the proposed method, by fixing the count of control steps and treating the sampling period as a variable, the TODTC problem is formulated as a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem by utilizing an iterative procedure. Generating initial feasible solutions systematically is also discussed, since these are usually needed in solving a NLP problem. In this manner, the optimization process of the NLP problem can be started from many different points when searching for the optimal solution. Simulation results are included, to show the feasibility of the proposed method.
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