Abstract

This study investigated the time-optimal low-thrust interplanetary transfer problem, and proposes a fast estimation method for guessing the initial costate and optimal transfer time based on a surrogate model, and applied it to the problem of the 11th Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GTOC 11). Two core methods are proposed in this paper: (1) a fast generation method called the neighbor point iteration algorithm (NPIA) is presented for rapidly generating low-thrust databases with high efficiency and accuracy; and (2) deep neural networks (DNNs) are adopted to learn the state–costate pairs of low-thrust databases, and the surrogate network can quickly estimate the initial costate and optimal transfer time of the low-thrust interplanetary problem. Experiments verified the proposed method and investigated the influence of network structure, learning rate, and loss function on the accuracy of network estimation. The effects of database generation and network estimation were compared based on three transfer scenarios: coplanar, non-coplanar, and arbitrary orbital transfer. In addition, the application case study showed that the proposed method can quickly obtain the time-optimal low-thrust solution to GTOC 11’s interplanetary transfer, which achieves high precision and meets the terminal constraints.

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Data Availability Statement

Some or all data, models, or codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Project of National University of Defense Technology (No. ZK22-02), and the Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Project of Hunan Province (CX20200026).

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Go to Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 36Issue 6November 2023

History

Received: Sep 20, 2022
Accepted: Apr 28, 2023
Published online: Aug 28, 2023
Published in print: Nov 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Jan 28, 2024

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Zhijun Chen [email protected]
Doctoral Student, College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National Univ. of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, PR China. Email: [email protected]
Jiaxiang Luo [email protected]
Doctoral Student, College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National Univ. of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, PR China. Email: [email protected]
Assistant Professor, College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National Univ. of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, PR China. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1737-7595. Email: [email protected]
Professor, College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National Univ. of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, PR China. Email: [email protected]
Professor, College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National Univ. of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, PR China (corresponding author). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7023-6519. Email: [email protected]
Xiaoqian Chen [email protected]
Professor, Chinese Academy of Military Science, Beijing 100091, PR China. Email: [email protected]

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