Optimal Bounded Thrust Powered Descent with Analytical Ground-Collision Avoidance

The paper proposes a new approach to address the bounded-thrust powered-descent problem while ensuring ground-collision avoidance. A time-dependent polynomial approximation of the mass is employed to formulate a bounded linear-quadratic optimal-control problem that minimizes the thrust-acceleration control effort, terminal miss, and terminal velocity error. The resulting approximation is used to impose a hard constraint on the horizontal thrust profile while keeping the vertical thrust profile unconstrained. The key idea is a hierarchical separation of the thrust allocation, which enables analytical ground-collision avoidance under bounded thrust. Unlike existing bounded-thrust powered-descent approaches based on numerical optimization and trajectory-shaping constraints, the proposed method provides explicit analytical collision-avoidance conditions. Building on this formulation, the guidance law predicts the switching times between saturated and unsaturated arcs and shapes the thrust-acceleration profile to achieve a soft landing, even when the controller remains saturated over extended portions of the trajectory. Owing to its analytical nature, the guidance law is computationally efficient, and its continuous thrust profile facilitates real-time implementation. The proposed method was evaluated over a grid of perturbed initial conditions in realistic simulations, demonstrating accurate collision-free soft-landing performance. The results highlight the importance of combining saturation-aware guidance with ground-collision avoidance under bounded thrust.

Source: arXiv:2606.17050v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17050v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.17050v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17050v1