An adaptive guidance algorithm for aerospace vehicles

The specifications for proposed space transportation systems are placing more emphasis on developing reusable avionics subsystems which have the capability to respond to vehicle evolution and diverse missions while at the same time reducing the cost of ground support for mission planning, contingency response and verification and validation. An innovative approach to meeting these goals is to specify the guidance problem as a multi-point boundary value problen and solve that problem using modern control theory and nonlinear constrained optimization techniques. This approach has been implemented as Gamma Guidance (Hardtla, 1978) and has been successfully flown in the Inertial Upper Stage. The adaptive guidance algorithm described in this paper is a generalized formulation of Gamma Guidance. The basic equations are presented and then applied to four diverse aerospace vehicles to demonstrate the feasibility of using a reusable, explicit, adaptive guidance algorithm for diverse applications and vehicles.