Guidance and control law for automatic landing flight experiment of reentry space vehicle

An automatic landing flight experiment with a sub-scale model is being prepared for a planned future reentry space vehicle by the National Aerospace Laboratory and the National Space Development Agency of Japan. The sub-scale model is dropped from a helicopter at a 1500m altitude, and, controlled by an on-board navigation, guidance, and control system, it automatically lands on a 1000m runway. This paper discusses preliminary study results obtained from numerical simulation by the National Aerospace Laboratory. The guidance and control law was designed using a multiple delay model and multiple design point approach (MDM/MDP., Control system robustness against uncertain and time varying dynamics is especially considered in this approach. The control performances are evaluated with appropriately defined quadratic indices of tracking error. Simple control structures are assumed and parameters are obtained with numerical optimization. The approach was successfully applied to the design, and feasibility of the experiment has been verified with numerical simulations.