Publications

Multi-stage stabilized continuation for indirect optimal control of hypersonic trajectories

Vedantam, Mihir; Akella, Maruthi R.; Grant, Michael J.

This work presents the application of stabilized continuation to the planar unpowered hypersonic trajectory generation problem using indirect optimal control methods. This scheme is non-iterative and guaranteed to terminate within a finite number of floating point operations-thereby making it well-suited for onboard autonomous operations. This algorithm involves using the stabilized continuation method in multiple stages starting with a “loose” integration tolerance and subsequently ramping up toward a “strict” integration tolerance. An important outcome of this approach is that even when the underlying optimal control problem governing the planar hypersonic trajectory becomes numerically stiff, our studies indicate that the stabilized continuation scheme terminates successfully with a converged solution.