Tutorial Sessions

IEEE Space, Aerospace and Defence Conference, SPACE 2025

Optimal Computational Guidance for Challenging Aerospace Missions

Abstract:

Aerospace missions are becoming increasingly complex and challenging. All stage recovery of launch vehicles for repetitive usage, planetary entry/re-entry, high-precision vertical soft-landing, station-keeping in unstable Halo orbits, in-orbit rendezvous and docking are a few examples of such missions. Similarly pin-point accuracy, angle constraint, look-angle constraint etc. are becoming an absolute must in missile guidance. Ideally, trajectory generation of such missions (and the associated guidance) require formulating a constrained nonlinear optimal control problem. Conventional techniques to solve such problems are known to suffer from severe computational difficulties in general, and hence, are ill-suited for onboard computers. Fortunately, recent advancements in innovative solution algorithms in addition to improved computational speed of onboard processors have come together to provide powerful computational guidance solutions. In fact, computational guidance has come a long way in the past two decades, and is now being confidently used.

In this tutorial, after giving the necessary background and motivation, three different computational guidance philosophies that are relevant to a variety of aerospace missions will be discussed in fair detail. These include (i) real-time optimal trajectory generation through lossless convexification, (ii) Pseudo-spectral optimal guidance, and (iii) a predictor-corrector scheme called MPSP (Model Predictive Static Programming), and its several variants. Several application problems will also be discussed to convey the significant advantage of this computational guidance approach.

Bio-sketch for Speaker:

Prof. Radhakant Padhi, received a Ph.D. from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, USA, is currently the HAL Chair Professor at the Department of Aerospace engineering in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and also an Associate Faculty at its Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems. He is a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, Astronautical Society of India, Aeronautical Society of India, Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), and Institute of Engineers (India). He is an Associate Fellow of AIAA and a Senior Member of Institute of IEEE. He is the Director of Operations of the Automatic Control and Dynamic Optimization Society, which is the national member organization of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) in India. He is an Associate Editor of Unmanned Systems journal, and has been an associated editor of two more journals in the past in the control and automation field.

Prof. Padhi’s research interest is on optimal and nonlinear control synthesis algorithms and their applications to challenging practical problems in aerospace, biomedical and mechanical engineering, as well as other application areas such as process control and laser beam pointing control. He has co-authored over 292 publications in international journals and conferences and also a book on Satellite Formation Flying. He is currently finalizing two more book manuscripts.

Prof. Padhi is a member of technical review committees for several missions of ISRO and DRDO of India, including the performance analysis committee, which analyzed the reasons for partial failure of Chandrayaan-2 mission and suggested the necessary improvements for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. Recently, Prof. Padhi has floated two deep-tech start-ups incubated in IISc (vtpl.tech and vapl.tech), through which he intends to utilize his research output for the benefit of society.