Duration: 18 months
The goal of our idea is to drastically reduce development time (and eventually cost) when designing and implementing/flight-testing the flight control laws of reusable launchers. This feat will be achieved by carefully combining data-driven (i.e. sensor-based) methods with elements of model-based automatic control approaches. The former rely much less on a detailed (and hence expensive to obtain) mathematical model of the launcher whereas the latter may offer additional performance and robustness guarantees if needed.
This radical paradigm shift from current practice (which still relies on legacy tools) is already heavily applied to flight control design for relevant aerospace applications such as drones and aircraft and will potentially lead to a faster and more robust control prototyping of reusable launchers. To evidence the benefits, legacy automatic control approaches will be compared back-to-back with our proposed techniques.
The proposed technological breakthrough will be tested in simulation using a realistic 6DoF launcher model (as well as industry-standard requirements) and also in a Software-In-the Loop setup. This combination of cutting-edge theory with up-to-date simulation tools can lead to a novel, more holistic, and most importantly less expensive approach for the design and validation of flight control laws of reusable launchers.
This development represents a significant advancement toward eventually fully model-free designs, while maintaining alignment with current practices to ensure the applicability and reliability essential for flight control algorithm trustworthiness.
