Maneuver planning of a rigid spacecraft with two skew control moment gyros

The attitude maneuver planning of a rigid spacecraft using two skew single-gimbal control moment gyros (CMGs) is investigated. First, two types of restrictions are enforced on the gimbal motions of two skew CMGs, with each restriction yielding continuous control torque along a principal axis of the spacecraft. Then, it is proved that any axis fixed to the spacecraft can be pointed along an arbitrary inertial direction by at most two sequent rotations around the two actuated axes. Given this fact, a two-step eigenaxis rotation strategy, executing by the two single-axis torques respectively, is designed to point a given body-fixed axis along a desired direction. Furthermore, a three-step eigenaxis rotation strategy is constructed to achieve an arbitrary rest-to-rest attitude maneuver. The rotation angles required for the single-axis pointing and arbitrary attitude maneuver schemes are all analytically solved. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.