Ricerc@Sapienza

Aerospace mission design requires the definition of a nominal trajectory, related to the expected performance of the vehicle, and the corrective actions tailored to compensating nonnominal flight conditions. These deviations may have an environmental nature or can arise from an imperfect vehicle modeling. This research addresses the development of an integrated methodology for optimization, guidance, and control of trajectory and attitude motion of aerospace vehicles, with potential application in several mission scenarios, e.g. atmospheric flight of aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, ascent path of launch vehicles, orbit transfers, and interplanetary missions. This unified architecture requires the preliminary modeling of both the aerospace vehicle of interest and the related dynamical environment, and is based on the joint, interactive application of specific algorithms. The indirect heuristic method is being employed for trajectory optimization, due to its capability of yielding the state, costate, and control vectors associated with the optimal path. The vehicle guidance and control will involve the interconnected use of the variable-time-domain neighboring optimal guidance and a constrained proportional-derivative attitude control algorithm. The guidance technique at hand refers to the optimal path as the reference trajectory, whereas the attitude control algorithm must consider some physical constraint related to the actuation system. Gain tuning through suitable optimization algorithms will be used to improve the overall performance of the methodology being developed in this research project. Some applications of practical relevance are being considered as study cases, for the purpose of testing the performance of the unified approach at hand, with the final objective of demonstrating its effectiveness, accuracy, and robustness.