An ADMM-based Decomposition Method for Human-Scale Mars Entry Guidance

This paper proposes a decomposition method for solving the Human-scale Mars entry guidance problem using direct force control. Previous work applied a unified modeling scheme to formulate the nonlinear optimal control problem into quadratically constrained quadratic programming, in which polynomials have been used to approximate mission constraints. It requires a high polynomial degree to capture local phenomena with high precision. To improve the scalability of the method to the entry guidance problem, a domain decomposition scheme is presented, in which The domain of the problem is split into multiple non-overlapping partitions, with added constraints ensuring continuities. In the end, a customized Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is used to optimize the sub-problem over each domain in a parallel manner while ensuring convergence on the boundaries of the partitions. In the end, the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed decomposition method for the entry guidance problem are verified through simulations. © 2023, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved.