Autonomous trajectory planning for launch vehicle under thrust drop failure

Abstract

An online autonomous rescue strategy and the algorithm for launch vehicle are studied in the case of a thrust drop during ascending flight. First, an iterative guidance method and numerical integration are used to evaluate the remaining carrying capacity. When the target orbit is unreachable, but the lowest safe orbit could be met, an optimal rescue orbit (ORO) needs to be solved. Using the geocentric angle estimation, orbit coordinate system transformation, and convexification, the maximum-height circular orbit in the orbit plane determined by states at failure time, is found under the constraint of geocentric angle. Then, an optimal circular orbit (OCO) relaxing the above constraint is solved by the adaptive collocation method (ACM) using the former solution as initial values. Finally, a decision whether to adjust other orbital elements by comparing the height between OCO and target orbit is made. The algorithm gives priority to the orbit height, optimizes the ORO based on the objective function weights, and makes full use of the advantages of geocentric angle estimation: simplifying the terminal constraints, making the convex optimization achieve good convergence, and improving the effectiveness of the ACM under reasonable initial guess. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy and algorithm are adaptable and, convergent for onboard application.