Bifurcation-Based Guidance Law for Powered Descent Landing

Abstract

This paper develops a new guidance law for powered descent landing of a rocket-powered vehicle. The proposed law derives the acceleration command for a point mass model of the vehicle by expressing velocity as a dynamical system undergoing supercritical transcritical bifurcation with three bifurcation parameters. The parameters are designed such that the stable equilibrium points of the velocity dynamics correspond to the guided targeting state, that is, the landing point. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the working of the proposed guidance law.