Robust and Adaptive Autolanding Control Strategies for Crew Exploration Vehicles (CEVs)

High precision landing of CEVs plays a vital role in ensuring safe and reliable mission on space exploration. This paper considers the problem of automatic landing control of CEV along a given path with specific landing orientations/attitudes. We formulate it as a 3D trajectory tracking problem and present a robust and adaptive landing control strategy. To account for modeling uncertainties and unpredictable disturbances during landing, we develop a new control strategy based on available system information only. The effect of uncertain dynamics and disturbances are compensated via robust and adaptive control algorithms. Unlike most existing approaches where complex design procedures and heavy computations are involved, the control algorithms developed in this work do not demand detail system model and can be easily set up for real-time implementation by on-board computer. Both theoretic analysis and simulation confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.