Autonomous guidance for landing on small bodies

Abstract

This thesis presents an autonomous navigation and guidance for accurate and safe landing on small bodies. Firstly, a navigation scheme based on inertial sensors, a camera, and a terrain map is presented. This so-called vision-aided inertial navigation provides high-bandwidth, low-latency state estimates necessary for the autonomous landing. Then, a 6-DOF landing guidance that generates and tracks a reference trajectory is introduced. To ensure robust performance in existence of various modeling uncertainties, Discrete Sliding Mode Control (DSMC) technique is used to design the tracking laws. The discrete and impulsive operations of thrusters are explicitly considered to minimize the tracking error and the unnecessary fuel consumption. Finally, the applicability of the proposed landing scheme is verified by numerical simulations.