A new guidance scheme for vehicles flying along the aerodynamic ascent path

Abstract

The paper, first of all, simply gives an introductory description about what the optimal guidance strategy is for the vehicles, which fly along the so-called aerodynamic ascent path. As commonly utilized, the paper first shows the results by the SCGRA method, while the paper secondly shows the other results via the SQP direct optimization method. The latter process is efficiently carried out by assuming that the steering angle is expressed in a certain orthogonal function coordinates. The primary result of the paper, which is the analytical description of the steering, also relates to this optimization discussion. It is clearly concluded that a conventional linear tangent law is applicable only to the non-lift vehicles. The conclusion at the same time indicates that the optimal guidance should request taking a trigonometric function that appear in the steering angle in addition to those from the conventional linear tangent law. The results presented in the paper further extend the optimization process to the guidance scheme with numerical demonstrations. Since the linearized translation motion fits better for the analytical model, the results of the paper successfully show the practical validity of it. The examples include the cases with the vehicle parameters varied from nominal and the sensitivity to those is examined. Show more