Adaptive guidance law design based on characteristic model for reentry vehicles

In this paper an adaptive guidance law based on the characteristic model is designed to track a reference drag acceleration for reentry vehicles like the Shuttle. The characteristic modeling method of linear constant systems is extended for single-input and single-output （SlSO） linear time-varying systems so that the characteristic model can be established for reentry vehicles. A new nonlinear differential golden-section adaptive control law is presented. When the coefficients belong to a bounded closed convex set and their rate of change meets some constraints, the uniformly asymptotic stability of the nonlinear differential golden-section adaptive control system is proved. The tracking control law, the nonlinear differential golden-section control law, and the revised logical integral control law are integrated to design an adaptive guidance law based on the characteristic model. This guidance law overcomes the disadvantage of the feedback linearization method which needs the precise model. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better performance of tracking the reference drag acceleration than the feedback linearizaUon one.