Optimal control and applications to orbital transfer and almost-riemannian geometry

2010

In this thesis we focus on optimal control techniques as well as geometric control techniques applied to the orbital transfer problem and to almost-Riemannian geometry. In these cases, Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle allows to analyse the extremal flow of affine control systems.In the case of a satellite with low-thrust propulsion, averaging techniques give an approximated system. Averaging is explicit in the energy minimization case and is directly related to almost-riemannian problems. The geometric analysis of such problems is generalized by the study of metrics on the two-sphere of revolution. In this way it is possible to classify the situations considering the transcendance of the solu…