Robust Fuel-Optimal Landing Guidance for Hazardous Terrain using Multiple Sliding Surfaces

Abstract: In any spacecraft landing mission, fuel-efficient precision soft landing while avoiding nearby hazardous terrain is of utmost importance. Very few existing literature have attempted addressing both the problems of precision soft landing and terrain avoidance simultaneously. To this end, an optimal terrain avoidance landing guidance (OTALG) was recently developed, which showed promising performance in avoiding the terrain while consuming near-minimum fuel. However, its performance significantly degrades in the face of external disturbances, indicating lack of robustness. To mitigate this problem, in this paper, a near fuel-optimal guidance law is developed to avoid terrain and achieve precision soft landing at the desired landing site. Expanding the OTALG formulation using sliding mode control with multiple sliding surfaces (MSS), the presented guidance law, named `MSS-OTALG', improves precision soft landing accuracy. Further, the sliding parameter is designed to allow the lander to avoid terrain by leaving the trajectory enforced by the sliding mode and eventually returning to it when the terrain avoidance phase is completed. And finally, the robustness of the MSS-OTALG is established by proving practical fixed-time stability. Extensive numerical simulations are also presented to showcase its performance in terms of terrain avoidance, low fuel consumption, and accuracy of precision soft landing under bounded atmospheric perturbations, thrust deviations, and constraints. Comparative studies against existing relevant literature validate a balanced trade-off of all these performance measures achieved by the developed MSS-OTALG.