Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Keywords. Navigation, Guidance, Control

A flight vehicle, regardless of whether it is a missile, an aircraft, or a

launch vehicle, needs the help of human intelligence in achieving its mission.
This human intelligence manifests itself in various forms like gathering in-
formation about flight conditions, generating appropriate commands to the
flight vehicle, and designing equipments to interpret these commands and
translate them into action onboard. Each flight vehicle has a mode of oper-
ation which might differ from another. For example, in a missile or a launch
vehicle, information is gathered by various sensors and conveyed to a com-
puter which then takes appropriate decisions. In an aircraft it is usually the
human pilot who takes decisions based upon similar information.

Irrespective of the kind of flight vehicle, the theory behind the design and
analysis of all these tasks eventually emanates from a branch of applied math-
ematics called control theory. The application of control theory to aerospace
may be divided into four areas.

Flight Planning : The determination of a nominal flight path and as-

sociated control histories for a given flight vehicle to accomplish specified

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objectives with specified constraints.

Navigation: The determination of a strategy for estimating the position

of a vehicle along the flight path, given outputs from specified sensors.

Guidance: The determination of a strategy for following the nominal path

in the presence of off-nominal conditions, wind disturbances, and navigational
uncertainties.

Control: The determination of a strategy for maintaining the angular

orientation of the vehicle during the flight that is consistent with the guidance
strategy, and the vehicle, crew, and passenger constraints.

However, it should be kept in mind that these four categories often overlap
and the boundaries between them are not very sharp. For example, consider
the aircraft velocity and its angular orientation. These are coupled and so
the guidance and control of aircraft must be considered together.

In these lecture notes we shall discuss some aspects of guidance and nav-
igation for certain specific flight vehicles. The first part of the lecture notes
(Chapters 2, 3 and 4) is devoted to radars. Radar is perhaps the most vital
equipment used for gathering information required for guidance and naviga-
tion of flight vehicles. For example, a surface-to-air missile requires informa-
tion about the target aircraft’s position and velocity. This is done by a radar,
either ground-based or air-borne ( i.e., carried by the missile itself), which
gathers the data required to obtain this information. This data is processed
in a computer and the result is then fed into the guidance computer.

An aircraft flying over an unknown terrain determines its own position

by collecting information from ground-based radars or from radars carried
by the aircraft itself. In these lectures notes we shall discuss different kinds
of radars and their operation.

In chapters 5 and 6 we shall discuss some important aspects of guided

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missiles, various guidance laws, and their performance in different scenarios.

Chapter 7 is devoted to aircraft navigation systems. We shall discuss

their basic principles of operation and also a few specific navigation systems
which are widely used now-a-days.

Chapter 8 introduces control systems in the classical perspective.

Chapter 9 is devoted to understanding Laplace Transforms and their cru-

cial role in the analysis of linear dynamical systems.

Chapter 10 deals with the time response of first order, second order and
higher order linear time-invariant systems.

Chapter 11 introduces the notion of stability of linear systems and the

criterion used to establish this important property.

Chapter 12 introduces the role of feedback control is achieving desired

performance from a system.

Chapter 13 and 14 introduces root locus as a design tool and how it is

used to design controllers.

Chapter 15 discusses the frequency response of linear systems.

Chapter 16 is the final chapter that briefly touches upon the basic notions
of the modern approach to control systems using state variables.