Autonomous Homing Design and Following for Parafoil/Rocket System with High-altitude

This paper addresses a challenging problem to achieve energy-saving autonomous homing to the desired target for a parafoil/rocket system with high-altitude. The system is subject to external unknown crosswind disturbance during the process. A novel optimal multiphase homing algorithm with high-altitude considering constant wind is first presented. To reduce the time-varying wind disturbance, an improved adaptive path-following guidance law is developed. In this method, the arctangent function is extended to a general form, and the convergence rate is improved by replacing the function. Stability and convergence of the guidance law are shown in the sense of Lyapunov. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed homing strategy reduces the energy consumption when the initial altitude is too high, and the tracking errors convergence faster. Numerical simulation is further conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.