Navigating an Underactuated Spaceship Through an Asteroid Field

The task is to determine how to fire thrusters to navigate a satellite from an initial state to a goal state (which brings to satellite to rest in the shuttle cargo bay). The image below shows the RRTs (this is a projection from the 12D state space), and the computed trajectory. The satellite is capable of both translation and rotation. This example was solved by Peng Cheng. The geometric model of the ship and obstacles were made by Andrew Olsen.

There are three bidirectional thrusters on the ship, none of which is through the center of mass.

MPEG Animation: [14.8MB] The animation is ten times the true speed (otherwise the animation would last too long).

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