A minimal time optimal control for a drone landing problem

We study a variant of the classical safe landing optimal control problem in aerospace engineering, introduced by Miele in 1962, where the target was to land a spacecraft on the moon by minimizing the consumption of fuel. A more modern model consists in replacing the spacecraft by a hybrid gas-electric drone. Assuming that the drone has a failure and that the thrust (representing the control) can act in both vertical directions, the new target is to land safely by minimizing time, no matter of what the consumption is. In dependence of the initial data (height, velocity, and fuel), we prove that the optimal control can be of four different kinds, all being piecewise constant. Our analysis covers all possible situations, including the nonexistence of a safe landing strategy due to the lack of fuel or for heights/velocities for which also a total braking is insufficient to stop the drone.

On the structure of the singular set of solutions in one class of 3D time-optimal control problems

A class of time-optimal control problems in terms of speed in three-dimensional space with a spherical velocity vector is considered. A smooth regular curve $\Gamma$ was chosen as the target set. Pseudo-vertices — characteristic points on $\Gamma,$ responsible for the appearance of a singularity in the optimal result function, are selected. The characteristic features of the structure of a singular set belonging to the family of bisectors are revealed. An analytical representation is found for the extreme points of the bisector corresponding to a fixed pseudo-vertex. As an illustration of the effectiveness of the developed methods for solving nonsmooth dynamic problems, an example of the numerical-analytical construction of resolving structures of a control problem in terms of speed is given.