Rocket Landing Control with Grid Fins and Path-following using MPC

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel MPC-based method for optimizing and following rocket landing trajectories using grid fins, focusing on fuel efficiency and robustness to model mismatch.

Contribution

It introduces TOPED, a new MPC algorithm with a novel cost function, for effective trajectory following under varying initial conditions and model uncertainties.

Findings

TOPED effectively follows demonstration trajectories in practice.

The method reduces fuel consumption during rocket landing.

TOPED demonstrates robustness to model mismatch and different initial states.

Abstract

In this project, we attempt to optimize a landing trajectory of a rocket. The goal is to minimize the total fuel consumption during the landing process using different techniques. Once the optimal and feasible trajectory is generated using batch approach, we attempt to follow the path using a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based algorithm, called Trajectory Optimizing Path following Estimation from Demonstration (TOPED), in order to generalize to similar initial states and models, where we introduce a novel cost function for the MPC to solve. We further show that TOPED can follow a demonstration trajectory well in practice under model mismatch and different initial states.