Guidance, Autonomy, Learning, and Control for Intelligent Systems (GALACxIS) Lab

This course can be divided into two subcourses of navigation techniques, and guidance processing. In the first part, i.e., naviagtion techniques, we are focused on determining the geographical position of a vehicle in order to guide it from one point to another. We will familiarize ourselves with various coordinate transformations and their representations, followed by devices such as inertial navigation sensors, global positioning system, etc. In the second part, we shall focus on guidance of autonomous vehicles, i.e., we shall study strategies using which an object is made to follow a nominal trajectory in the presence of off-nominal conditions. These off-nominal conditions, in the context of aerospace engineering, may arise due to a number of factors such as wind gust, turbulence, navigational anomalies, change in weather conditions during flight, etc. More intuitively, when we will discuss guidance, we will generally consider an object (pursuer/interceptor) and a goal (target/evader). A general requirement on the object's part will be such that it attains a trajectory to come closer to the goal as time progresses.