Intelligent cooperative control for flexible landing on small celestial bodies

In view of the potential landing risks in small celestial body landing missions, the concept of flexible landing has been proposed in recent years. By employing a flexible lander with structural compliance to complex surface topography, the risks of rebound or overturning upon touchdown can be reduced. During flexible landing, the overall motion of the flexible lander is controlled by several nodes embedded in the flexible structure. Due to the flexible deformation, the motion among the nodes is intricately coupled, posing challenges to the control algorithm design. To address this problem, an intelligent cooperative control method for flexible landing is proposed in this paper. By decomposing the flexible internal force into a low-order principal term with specific physical interpretation and an unmodeled high-order residual term, the coupling relationship among the nodes is characterized. On this basis, the low-order dynamics system is reconstructed into a piecewise affine system, upon which a multi-node cooperative optimal controller is designed. A long-short-term memory recurrent neural network is further established to compensate for the unmodeled high-order term. Through the combination of the low-order principal control and the high-order intelligent compensation, a feasible approach for achieving flexible landing is obtained. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is verified via 433 Eros-based flexible landing simulations.