Active disturbance rejection control for drag tracking in mars entry guidance

Future Mars missions will require precision landing capability, which motivates the need for entry closed-loop guidance schemes. A new tracking law – active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) – is presented in this paper. The ability of the ADRC tracking law to handle the atmospheric models and the vehicle’s aerodynamic errors is investigated. Monte Carlo simulations with dispersions in entry state variables, drag and lift coefficients, and atmospheric density show effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.