Approach and landing guidance design for reusable launch vehicle using multiple sliding surfaces technique

An autonomous approach and landing (A&L) guidance law is presented in this paper for landing an unpowered reusable launch vehicle (RLV) at the designated runway touchdown. Considering the full nonlinear point-mass dynamics, a guidance scheme is developed in three-dimensional space. In order to guarantee a successful A&L movement, the multiple sliding surfaces guidance (MSSG) technique is applied to derive the closed-loop guidance law, which stems from higher order sliding mode control theory and has advantage in the finite time reaching property. The global stability of the proposed guidance approach is proved by the Lyapunov-based method. The designed guidance law can generate new trajectories on-line without any specific requirement on off-line analysis except for the information on the boundary conditions of the A&L phase and instantaneous states of the RLV. Therefore, the designed guidance law is flexible enough to target different touchdown points on the runway and is capable of dealing with large initial condition errors resulted from the previous flight phase. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed guidance law in different scenarios.