Electronics and Electrical Engineering and Control

Rapid reentry trajectory planning for hypersonic vehicles with proactive no-fly zone separation assurance

  • Yao ZHAO ,
  • Xi ZHANG ,
  • Di ZHOU ,
  • Yutang LI ,
  • Siyuan LI
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  • 1.School of Astronautics,Harbin Institute of Technology,Harbin 150001,China
    2.Science and Technology on Space Physics Laboratory,China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology,Beijing 100076,China
E-mail: zhoud@hit.edu.cn

Received date: 2025-07-03

  Revised date: 2025-07-25

  Accepted date: 2025-10-13

  Online published: 2025-10-30

Abstract

To address the reentry trajectory planning problem for hypersonic vehicles with spherical No-Fly Zone (NFZ) constraints, this paper proposes a Sequential Convex Programming (SCP) method based on dynamic objective reconstruction and a hybrid step-size control strategy, enabling proactive NFZ separation assurance. First, a potential function is introduced to model the spherical NFZs as soft constraints, transforming the reentry trajectory planning problem into a sequence of convex subproblems with coupled soft and hard constraints. Second, to mitigate numerical overflow issues caused by the potential function and reduce sensitivity to initial guesses, a two-phase “feasibility-optimality” dynamic decoupling framework is developed. The first phase focuses on computing a feasible solution to generate a high-quality initial trajectory for subsequent optimization, while the second phase dynamically reconstructs the optimization objective using the soft-constraint potential function to maximize the standoff distance from NFZs without significantly compromising primary performance objectives. Furthermore, a hybrid step-size control strategy is designed by integrating the trust-region method with the line-search algorithm, effectively exploiting descent information from rejected steps and improving computational efficiency. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm guarantees a sufficient safety margin from spherical NFZs. Compared with the conventional trust-region convex optimization method, the proposed method improves computational speed by a 95%, and reduces terminal altitude and velocity errors by factors of 19 and 6, respectively. Compared to the Gauss pseudospectral method, the proposed approach achieves a threefold increase in computational speed while maintaining comparable terminal altitude and velocity accuracy, highlighting its promising potential for practical applications.

Cite this article

Yao ZHAO , Xi ZHANG , Di ZHOU , Yutang LI , Siyuan LI . Rapid reentry trajectory planning for hypersonic vehicles with proactive no-fly zone separation assurance[J]. ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA, 2026 , 47(6) : 332509 -332509 . DOI: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2025.32509

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