Autonomous parafoil precision landing using convex real-time optimized guidance and control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time convex optimization guidance and control strategy for autonomous parafoil precision landings, significantly improving performance and adaptability over existing systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel convex optimization-based guidance approach with in-flight recalculation, ensuring local optimality and fast convergence for parafoil landing control.

Findings

Performance improved by about one order of magnitude in simulations

The method is reliable and scalable to various atmospheric parafoil systems

Demonstrates faster convergence and better trajectory optimization

Abstract

To overcome the limitations of current parafoil precision landing capabilities, an efficient real-time convex optimized guidance and control strategy is presented. Successive convexification of the parafoil guidance problem guarantees local optimality with polynomial convergence rate for efficient real-time implementation, where each iteration is dynamically feasible. Our approach shows reliable and fast numerical convergence through in-flight recalculation of time of flight and a new optimal trajectory to cope with time-varying dynamics. The efficiency of our strategy is demonstrated via a comparative analysis of the existing X-38 in-flight demonstrated guidance and control system. Exhaustive Monte-Carlo simulations show performance improvements of about one order of magnitude. The concept proposed is simple, yet general, as it scales to any atmospheric parafoil landing system and allows efficient implementation relying only on the turn rate information.