Managing constraints for infeasible rocket landing problems

Hubert Ménou (1) , Éric Bourgeois (2) , Nicolas Petit (1)

1 CAS - Centre Automatique et Systèmes
2 CNES - Centre National d’Études Spatiales [Paris]

For reusable launchers, in-flight landing trajectory planning is a challenging task. The naturally disturbed atmospheric environment may render the landing objectivessuch as the landing site location or the incidence safety boundsmutually incompatible. This article discusses a methodology to recover feasibility in over-constrained optimization problems used for Powered Descent Guidance. Nominal and emergency guidance problems are first discussed from a high-level viewpoint, and then developed to handle a Quadratic Programming based guidance method, which is illustrated on numerical examples for a planar rocket model.

Domaines: Optimisation et contrôle [math.OC]

Hubert Ménou, Éric Bourgeois, Nicolas Petit. Managing constraints for infeasible rocket landing problems. 25th ESA Symposium on European rocket & balloon programmes and related research, May 2022, Biarritz, France. ⟨hal-03934020⟩