SIE556

The main objective of the course is to introduce the students with the fundamental principles behind the development of guidance laws for aerospace systems. More specifically, the course will introduce basic and more advanced guidance concepts for aerospace vehicles and discuss their practical implementation on missiles, planetary landers, reentry and launch vehicles. The first part of the course is focused on the intercept guidance problem and its application to guided missile systems. The basic ideas behind the proportional navigation are introduced together with a detailed analysis of the PN law on both time and frequency domain. The guidance law design is viewed from a control theory standpoint and design methods using both time domain and frequency domain are introduced. Special emphasis is placed on non-linear control design techniques including sliding control mode and Lyapunov-based approach for a robust design and improvement of targeting performance. In the second part of the course, the optimal control theory is introduced as main tool to design guidance algorithms for planetary landers. More specifically, the design of guidance laws for powered descent landing on planetary bodies is discussed. Both numerical and analytical methods to determine targeting reference trajectories are presented together with real-time guidance algorithms that close the loop on the planned path. The third part of the course will be focused on a) guidance algorithms for hypersonic reentry vehicles and b) ascent guidance for Launch Vehicles (LV). In this contest, guidance algorithms available to control the bank angle for low lift-to-drag ratio capsules will be discussed together with powered exoatmospheric guidance algorithms for LV orbit targeting. Particular emphasis will be given to the practical implementation of the guidance algorithms. Graduate-level requirements include answering additional questions during the midterm as well as providing additional analysis and more extensive simulations at the final project stage.

Fall

Fall

Fall