Obstacle avoidance guidance for planetary landing using convex trajectory and adaptive curvature regulation

Abstract

Autonomous landing in complex and hazardous terrains is a critical stage of planetary in-situ exploration and sample-return missions. The design of the landing trajectory has to seek a balance between safety and fuel economy. Based on the theorems of convex trajectory and curvature guidance law, this paper proposes an obstacle avoidance guidance method with an adaptive curvature adjusting mechanism. The method remains the advantage in obstacle avoidance of the existed curvature guidance, and can further minimize fuel consumption by adopting a global optimization technique with a specific curvature constraint. Firstly, the nonconvex curvature constraint is transformed into a second-order cone constraint to construct a standard convex programming problem. The curvature adjustment strategy is then designed to adapt the trajectory to varying terrain conditions. By introducing the successive convex technique, the adaptive curvature guidance strategy is also suitable for small celestial body landing problems in nonlinear dynamic environments. Simulations of typical planetary landing scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving safety and fuel efficiency.