Predictive terminal guidance with tuning of prediction horizon & constrained control

Abstract

Continuous time-predictive control approach is employed to formulate an output tracking nonlinear, optimal, terminal guidance law for re-entry vehicles. The notable features of this formulation are that the system equations are not linearised and the evaluation of the guidance equations does not need the information of vehicle parameters, such as drag and mass. The formulation allows to impose the physical constrains on the control inputs, i.e. on the demanded lateral accelerations through a saturation mapping and the controls are obtained using a fixed point iteration algorithm which converges typically in a few iterations. Further, a simple method of tuning the prediction horizon needed in the guidance equations is presented. Numerical simulations show that the guidance law achieves almost zero terminal errors in all states despite large errors in initial conditions