Non-holonomic turn and its application to spacecraft attitude maneuvers

This paper shows the dynamic properties interpreted about a falling cat motion. In the IAC in Vancouver last year, a new interpretation on non-holonomic turns was presented from coning effect point of view. While the last year's synthesis infers even the kinematics effect independent of dynamics may still drive the non-holonomic turn. However, that motion is, in this paper, proved not fully true and shown partly dependent on the inertia properties. This paper presents new interpretation findings which show the resulted non-holonomic turn may become reverse dependent on the moment of inertia ratio. This Fukuoka conference paper corrects the motion structure interpretation, in which a very interesting combination of kinematics and dynamics is found to govern the motion. And a numerical example is given for the spacecraft attitude maneuver, whose time history is explicitly described. A special feedforward control law is derived and applied to the maneuver. The results show the control strategy established well functions and enables the reorientation to be accomplished only via internal torque. What is presented does provide a comprehensive strategy widely applicable to spacecraft and space robots.