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Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics

Attainable Moment Set And Actuation Time Of A Bio-Inspired Rotating Empennage, Christian R. Bolander, Douglas F. Hunsaker, David Myszka, James J. Joo Jan 2022

Attainable Moment Set And Actuation Time Of A Bio-Inspired Rotating Empennage, Christian R. Bolander, Douglas F. Hunsaker, David Myszka, James J. Joo

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Future tactical aircraft will likely demonstrate improvements in efficiency, weight, and control by implementing bio-inspired control systems. This work analyzes a novel control system for a fighter aircraft inspired by the function of – and the degrees of freedom available in – a bird’s tail. The control system is introduced to an existing fighter aircraft design by removing the vertical tail and allowing the horizontal tail surfaces to rotate about the roll axis. Using a low-fidelity aerodynamic model, an analysis on the available controlling moments and actuation speeds of the baseline aircraft is compared to that of the bio-inspired rotating …


Navigation Performance Of Line/Plane Intersection Lidar Model In Conjunction With Opportunistic Feature Tracker, Michael R. Hansen Aug 2021

Navigation Performance Of Line/Plane Intersection Lidar Model In Conjunction With Opportunistic Feature Tracker, Michael R. Hansen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

With NASA awarding numerous contracts to build commercial lunar payload spacecraft and human lunar landers, the need for high precision navigation has increased. Traditional inertial navigation alone is not sufficient to autonomously land a vehicle on hazardous lunar terrain. Terrain relative navigation (TRN) systems have been explored in previous research that exploit camera observations of known landmarks. Such approaches require the flight electronics to correctly match features of the observed landmarks to an onboard database, in the drastically varying lighting conditions of moon. This paper explores the performance of a TRN system that does not rely on apriori landmark identification, …


Analytic Guidance Strategies For Passively Safe Rendezvous And Proximity Operations, Simon Shuster Dec 2020

Analytic Guidance Strategies For Passively Safe Rendezvous And Proximity Operations, Simon Shuster

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A safety ellipse is a type of relative motion trajectory that is commonly used for unmanned rendezvous and proximity operations. As the name suggests, safety ellipses are passively safe relative motion trajectories, which means that their natural motion inherently maintains a low collision risk. The focus of this dissertation is the derivation, analysis, and application of guidance strategies that reconfigure, establish, and exit a safety ellipse. The guidance strategies consist of a set of ∆v vectors and impulse times, all written in closed form. Through applications of optimal control theory and parameter optimization, it is shown that these maneuver …