Related papers: Fuel-Optimal Powered Descent Guidance for Hazardou…
In any spacecraft landing mission, fuel-efficient precision soft landing while avoiding nearby hazardous terrain is of utmost importance. Very few existing literature have attempted addressing both the problems of precision soft landing and…
This work presents a sequential convex program method to compute fuel-optimal collision avoidance maneuvers for long-term encounters. The low-thrust acceleration model is used to account for the control, but the method can compute…
In this paper we present a new approach to solve the fuel-efficient powered descent guidance problem on large planetary bodies with no atmosphere (e.g. the Moon or Mars) using the recently developed Theory of Functional Connections. The…
This paper presents the preliminary design of the descent and landing trajectory of the ESA Argonaut lunar lander. The mission scenario and driving system constraints are presented and accounted for in the design of a fuel-optimal…
This paper addresses the problem of trajectory optimization for an unmanned surface vehicle while considering direction-dependent ocean currents and flexible refueling constraints. This work is motivated by the rising interest in developing…
Future Mars missions will require advanced guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for the powered descent phase to target specific surface locations and achieve pinpoint accuracy (landing error ellipse $<$ 5 m radius). The latter…
We present an algorithm to perform fuel-optimal stationkeeping for spacecraft in unstable halo orbits with additional constraints to ensure safety in the event of a control failure. We formulate a convex trajectory-optimization problem to…
This paper presents a Neural Networks (NNs) based approach for designing the Fuel-Optimal Powered Descent Guidance (FOPDG) for lunar pinpoint landing. According to Pontryagin's Minimum Principle, the optimality conditions are first derived.…
Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…
Consuming long-range interplanetary medium with fuel for driving plasma thrust is vital. Methods of capturing the space environment depending on its density and the ship velocity are indispensable issues to extract the space environment as…
Platooning is a way to significantly reduce fuel consumption of trucks. Vehicles that drive at close inter-vehicle distance assisted by automatic controllers experience substantially lower air-drag. In this paper, we deal with the problem…
Autonomous exploration is a fundamental problem for various applications of unmanned aerial vehicles. Existing methods, however, were demonstrated to insufficient exploration rate, due to the lack of efficient global coverage, conservative…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…
It is a challenging task for ground robots to autonomously navigate in harsh environments due to the presence of non-trivial obstacles and uneven terrain. This requires trajectory planning that balances safety and efficiency. The primary…
The problem under consideration is to drive a spatial vehicle to a target at a given final time while minimizing fuel consumption. This is a classical optimal control problem in a deterministic setting. However temporary stochastic failures…
Persistent monitoring missions require an up-to-date knowledge of the changing state of the underlying environment. UAVs can be gainfully employed to continually visit a set of targets representing tasks (and locations) in the environment…
Low cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) need multiple refuels to accomplish large area coverage. The number of refueling stations and their placement plays a vital role in determining coverage efficiency. In this paper, we propose the use…
Powered descent guidance (PDG) problems subject to six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) dynamics allow for enforcement of practical attitude constraints. However, numerical solutions to 6DOF PDG problems are challenging due to fast rotational…
A key challenge in off-road navigation is that even visually similar terrains or ones from the same semantic class may have substantially different traction properties. Existing work typically assumes no wheel slip or uses the expected…
The paper provides a new approach to utilizing space environmental forces in time- and energy-optimal, propellant-less spacecraft rendezvous missions. Considering the nonlinear form of the relative dynamic equations, rendezvous missions are…