Performance improvement-oriented reentry attitude control for reusable launch vehicles with overload constraint

This paper investigates the issue of reentry attitude control for reusable launch vehicles with overload constraint, and proposes a performance improvement-oriented control scheme. Incorporating the overload constraint into the performance functions, the presented control law proves to guarantee the overload limitation not violating throughout the reentry phase. Compared with traditional performance-guaranteed methods, the presented control introduces a special performance function to achieve better transient performance. Moreover, the attitude control model is reduced to a first-order system with disturbances, leading to a significant reduction of the sophisticated structure by the standard backstepping based approaches. The implementation of the control scheme in the practical engineering is also discussed including the control moment allocation. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.