Optimal attitude control for landing on asteroid with a flexible lander

The recently developed flexible lander offers a potential option for future asteroid landing missions due to its advantages in suppression of rebound and overturning. The strong nonlinear dynamics and control constraints of the flexible lander hinder the online implementation of optimal attitude feedback control. To generate the optimal attitude control rapidly, a constrained inhomogeneous approximating sequence of Riccati equations (CI-ASRE) method is proposed. The saturation function is firstly constructed to incorporate control magnitude constraints into dynamics so that the constraints can be analytically handled. Subsequently, to avoid singularity, a partial factorization strategy is proposed to convert the constrained dynamics into two parts, a pseudolinear term and an inhomogeneous term. This factorization enables the nonlinear problem to be expressed as the limit of a sequence of inhomogeneous linear quadratic problems while avoiding local linearization. At last, the analytical CI-ASRE is newly derived to iteratively solve these problems to rapidly obtain optimal feedback control. The computational simplicity and effectiveness of the CI-ASRE method overcome difficulties of optimal attitude control problems of the flexible lander associated with control constraints, strong nonlinearity, and online feedback control generation. The effectiveness of the proposed method for the flexible lander is verified using a landing scenario on asteroid 433 Eros.