Adaptive Guidance and Control for Autonomous Hypersonic Vehicles

Current guidance and control technology is recognized as an impediment to the common military, civil, and commercial goal of achieving reliable, low-cost, aircraft-type operations into space. A team lead by Guided Systems Technologies, Inc. hassuccessfully demonstrated the key components of a fully adaptive ascent guidance and control system that offers a high degree of mission flexibility, fault tolerance, and autonomy. The design consists of an adaptive autopilot (inner loop) commanded by anadaptive closed-loop guidance system (outer loop), which in turn is driven by a trajectory command that is continually optimized on-line. For both the inner and outer loops, a simple dynamic inversion controller is used to approximately linearize thedynamics of the nonlinear system. A single neural network is appended to the feedback system which