12.11.2012

Informatik-Kolloquium

Im Wintersemester 2012/2013 findet im Rahmen des Informatik-Kolloquiums der folgende Vortrag statt:

Montag, 12. November 2012, 17:00 Uhr, Turing-Hörsaal

Prof. Dr. Radhakant Padhi (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Indien)

Real-time Optimal Control in Aerospace

Even though the theory of optimal control is quite fascinating and a great deal of research has been carried out since the time of Bernoulli and Newton, time and again it has been observed that it suffers from either the “curse of complexity” or the “curse of dimensionality”, making it virtually impossible to implement in real time. However, several pioneering research has been done in last two decades which cuts through these bottlenecks. A variety of innovative ideas and algorithms have appeared in the literature to compute the optimal control history in real time, thereby opening a whole new possibility of limitless applications, especially in Aerospace. Rapid advancement of computing power has also added positively to this cause. This colloquium talk will first briefly give an overview of optimal control theory as well as some of the recently-developed algorithms for fast computation of the optimal control history. Next, a specific algorithm developed and used extensively by the speaker and his co-workers, named as “model predictive static programming (MPSP)” will be discussed with fair detail with a few challenging applications in guidance of aerospace vehicles, including satellite formation flying and re-entry guidance of a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV).