Planning-based Autonomous Lander Control
Johannes Löhr, Bernhard Nebel, STEFAN S. WINKLER · AIAA/AAS Astrodynamics Specialist Conference · 2012
Safe landing of spacecraft on extraterrestrial surfaces implies a number of challenges. The main issue is to precisely initiate coasting, braking and landing maneuvres to safely land at a desired landing zone. Meanwhile, the increasing information level about the landing environment has to be processed and the landing trajectory eventually adapted in order to avoid hazardous situations. In this paper these time critical tasks are performed by Domain Predictive Control. It has been developed to guide dynamic systems into desired goal states by exibly reordering atomic actions using planning algorithms from articial intelligence. Here, the method is applied to autonomously adapt control commands and associated landing trajectories with respect to the changing environmental knowledge. Simulation results show the feasibility of this new approach and reveal issues which should be subject to future research.