Optimized Control Allocation of an Articulated Overactuated Solar Sail

This research is dedicated to introducing a novel structure for small-sized solar sail by using rotatable vanes and reflectivity control devices. The overactuated design that is proposed for the solar sail resulted in a mixed-integer-continuous and nonlinear optimization for control allocation. Trying to solve this complex problem by common numerical and analytical approaches, either the desired torque has been found at the expense of a long and noneligible length of time or they failed to converge at a certain extremum. Thus, addressing the desired torque to the space of possibilities has been accomplished by formulating the attainable moments of forces of each vane by a modified egg-shaped equation in three dimensions. The optimization problem of the control allocation has been solved to minimize the overall changes in vane angles as object function by a hybrid optimization. The accuracy of value matching between the target and the actual torques and the huge improvement in time consumption to achieve optimized control allocation is evaluated in the results.