Waypoint-Optimized Zero-Effort-Miss/Zero-Effort-Velocity Feedback Guidance for Mars Landing

This paper investigates the optimization approach to generate waypoints for the Mars landing problem in the context of employing the zero-effort-miss/zero-effort-velocity feedback guidance algorithm. For a power-limited engine, the waypoint optimization problem in the presence of state constraints is converted to an equivalent standard quadratic programming problem, which can be solved efficiently. In the case with a thrust-limited engine, by introducing a continuously differentiable function to approximate the standard saturation function, the optimal waypoint can be determined using open-source optimization software. This novel idea exploits parameter optimization techniques for feedback control implementation, thus, it can combine the advantages of open-loop and closed-loop methods to achieve near-optimal performance with acceptable robustness, while meeting various practical constraints and requirements.