Adaptive tracking guidance for powered aeroassisted orbital maneuver under system uncertainties and input constraints

The powered aeroassisted orbital maneuver (AOM) is an emerging type of AOM manner, which can fulfill various complicated orbital transfer missions more flexibly and efficiently by virtue of aerodynamic forces and synergetic thrust. In this paper, an adaptive control strategy is presented for the reference trajectory tracking guidance of powered AOM under system uncertainties and input constraints. The presented controller is designed with an attack angle control law and a bank angle control law. The constrained control inputs are smoothly described through a hyperbolic tangent-type function. Then, the attack angle and bank angle control laws are separately developed by utilizing the first-order and second-order backstepping control methods. Besides, the parametric adaptive mechanism is incorporated to identify the squares of the upper bounds of the total uncertain items. Benefiting from this design, the presented controller can not only resist system uncertainties, but also accommodate input constraints. The stability evaluation shows that the radial distance and velocity tracking errors under the presented controller can eventually stabilize to the bounded minor fields around zero. Lastly, the derived results are verified through comparative studies with an existing controller and Monte Carlo simulations under different conditions.