Trajectory and Attitude Control for a Lunar lander Using a Reference Model (2nd Report)

In this paper, a redesigned guidance and control system for a lunar lander is presented. In past studies, the authors developed a trajectory and attitude control system which achieves the vertical soft landing on the lunar surface. It is confirmed that the system has a good tracking ability to a predefined profile and good robustness against a thruster failure mode where a partial failure of clustered engines was assumed. However, under the previous control laws, the landing point tends to be shifted, in response to the system parameter values, from a target point. Also, an unbalanced moment due to a thruster failure mode was not considered in the simulation. Therefore, in this study, the downrange control is added to the system to enable the vehicle to land at a pre-assigned target point accurately. Furthermore, inhibiting the effect of the unbalanced moment is attempted thorough redesigning the attitude control system. A numerical simulation was performed to confirm the ability of the proposed system with regard to the above problems. Moreover, in the past simulations, a low initial altitude was assumed as an initial condition: in this study, however, the performance of the proposed system is examined over the whole trajectory from an initial altitude of 10 [km] to the lunar surface.