On-Line Trajectory Generation for Aerospace Vehicles

The SBIR team proposes the continued development and enhancement of a comprehensive, robust, unified Trajectory Management System (TMS). This system features a novel trajectory design methodology integrated with an innovative on-line aerodynamic identification architecture. The trajectory design methodology employs computationally efficient algorithms yielding feasible trajectories that are robust with respect to degraded vehicle performance resulting from vehicle damage and/or malfunction. The aerodynamic identification scheme uses on-line measurements to produce a global estimate of the vehicle’s aerodynamic characteristics augmented with local corrections from which global aerodynamic constraint estimates are derived and utilized in the trajectory reshaping/retargeting process as well as in the reconfigurable control system. Overall system performance will be further enhanced through the application of modern nonlinear tracking and antiwindup compensation methods to the design of improved guidance and control laws. The SBIR team also proposes to develop an integrated guidance and control (IG&C) architecture featuring an autonomous top-level flight manager that coordinates control reconfiguration, guidance reconfiguration, and trajectory reshaping/retargeting. The SBIR team will leverage its recent experience in flight manager technology development to provide this significant enhancement to the Phase II project with relatively modest incremental effort. The Phase II effort will culminate in the development of a working prototype of the fully integrated Trajectory Management System and demonstration in a high-fidelity simulation environment.