Low-Cost Miniature Flight Control System

"Athena Technologies, Incorporated (Athena) proposes to develop an affordable, lightweight and low power, INS/GPS integrated flight control system (FCS) capable of performing guidance, navigation and control functions for small launch vehicles. The proposedapproach leverages Athena's expertise in design, fabrication and operational qualification of our family of miniaturized GuideStar flight control hardware and our patented and flight demonstrated Feedback LTI'zation control algorithms. Unlike conventionalgain scheduling techniques that require design and testing of tens or hundreds of control design points and switching among each, Feedback LTI'zation uniquely achieves this with the design of only a few design points, valid and stable over the entireflight envelope. This design formulation elegantly rapidly produces robust and very small footprint control algorithms and control gains, resulting in efficient software maintenance, moderate computational requirements, and overall reduction in softwarelife cycle cost. We believe Athena's expertise in highly integrated hardware design in combination with the elegance of our flight control algorithms, afford a powerful and innovative solution in producing a new generation of miniaturized and veryaffordable advanced avionics applicable to Kinetic Kill Vehicles (KKV) and a myriad of other launch vehicles. Athena foresees a large potential market in the application of flight control systems