Energy Suboptimal Collision-Free Path Reconfiguration for Spacecraft Formation Flying

ThisNotepresentsamethodforthegenerationofenergysuboptimal,collision-free, reconfiguration trajectories for formations flying in deep space(gravity-free environment). The main idea is to introduce a set ofwaypoints through which these trajectories pass and to assume thatthe trajectories are piecewise cubic polynomials. The resulting op-timization problem has a quasi-quadratic structure in the waypointsparameters.Gradient-basedalgorithms,whichexploitthisstructure,are developed for the solution. Examples show that this methodol-ogy is very efficient and fast.