Spacecraft guidance techniques for maximizing mission success.

摘要

Traditional spacecraft guidance techniques have the objective of deterministically minimizing fuel consumption. These traditional approaches to guidance are developed independently of the navigation system, and without regard to stochastic effects. This work presents and demonstrates a new approach to guidance design. This new approach seeks to maximize the probability of mission success subject to a total fuel consumption constraint. A novel mechanism for imposing the fuel consumption constraint on a stochastic system is presented. Once the fuel constraint is imposed techniques from stochastic linear system theory are used to find a solution to the problem. This new approach to guidance is demonstrated by solving a simple Zermelo boat problem. This example shows a significant reduction in terminal dispersions is possible with small increases to fuel budgeted for the maneuver.