Robust Reentry Guidance of a Reusable Launch Vehicle Using Model Predictive Static Programming

By Omkar Halbe, Ramsingh G. Raja, Radhakant Padhi. 2014

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

DOI: 10.2514/1.61615 A robust suboptimal reentry guidance scheme is presented for a reusable launch vehicle using the recently developed, computationally efficient model predictive static programming. The formulation uses the nonlinear vehicle dynamics with a spherical and rotating Earth, hard constraints for desired terminal conditions, and an innovative cost function having several components with associated weighting factors that can account for path and control constraints in a soft constraint manner, thereby leading to smooth solutions of the guidance parameters. The proposed guidance essentially shapes the trajectory of the vehicle by computing the necessary angle of attack and bank angle that the vehicle should execute. The path constraints are the structural load constraint, thermal load constraint,boundsontheangleofattack,andboundsonthebankangle.Inaddition,theterminalconstraintsinclude thethree-dimensional position andvelocity vectorcomponentsat theend of thereentry.Whereasthe angle-of-attack commandis generated directly, the bank angle commandis generated by first generating the requiredheading angle history and then using it in a dynamic inversion loop considering the heading angle dynamics. Such a two-loop synthesis of bank angle leads to better management of the vehicle trajectory and avoids mathematical complexity as well. Moreover, all bank angle maneuvers have been confined to the middle of the trajectory and the vehicle ends the reentrysegmentwith near-zerobankangle,whichis quitedesirable.Ithasalsobeendemonstratedthattheproposed guidance has sufficient robustness for state perturbations as well as parametric uncertainties in the model.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae71c906470ecbadab904c2194cfba4ceeff746b