Maneuvering Tracking Algorithm for Reentry Vehicles With Guaranteed Prescribed Performance

This article presents a prescribed performance-based tracking control strategy for the atmospheric reentry flight of space vehicles subject to rapid maneuvers during flight missions. Although earlier works presented control algorithms with a focus on transient performance, it is still an open problem how to ensure the stability of the system during maneuvering flight missions. A time-triggered nonmonotonic performance funnel is proposed with the aim of constraint violation avoidance in the case of sudden changes in the reference trajectory. Compared with traditional prescribed performance control methods, the proposed funnel boundary is adaptive with respect to the reference path and is capable of achieving stability under disturbances. A recursive control structure with low complexity is introduced that does not require any knowledge of specific system parameters. Through a stability analysis, we show that the tracking error evolves within the prescribed error margin under a condition that represents a tradeoff between the reference signal and the performance funnel. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control scheme are verified by simulations.