Control of rotational motion with application to spacecraft attitude

The paper adopts the energy shaping method to rotational motion control of a spacecraft. The configuration manifold considered in this paper is the 3-sphere. The quaternion and its conjugate momentum are used for global representation of motion in the canonical form. The design algorithm presented is validated for three typical attitude control objectives: stabilization in an inertial coordinate system, slew maneuver with obstacle avoidance, and active vibration damping for a low Earth orbit spacecraft.