Reachability Analysis for Atmospheric Reentry Vehicle

What is it about?

Atmospheric re-entry poses significant challenges for hypersonic vehicles. The intense heat generated during this phase of flight can cause damage to the vehicle's structure and materials if not properly managed. This highlights the importance of having guidance, navigation, and control systems that are robust enough to handle the unique conditions of hypersonic flight, while ensuring the vehicle can withstand the dynamic loads, heat transfer, and thermal protection issues, intrinsic to the re-entry phase. Hypersonic re-entry includes dynamics with significant nonlinearities, state and control constraints, and parameter uncertainties. Given these nonlinearities and uncertainties, precise guidance and control is necessary for successful missions together with safety systems to ensure robustness. For example, the vehicle might need to re-plan a trajectory to an alternate landing site if it is too far away from a previously selected site and it was `not reachable'. In these situations, a map of attainable states of the dynamical system is required to mitigate these concerns. Reachability analysis fulfills this need by obtaining the set of all feasible states for a dynamical system starting from an initial condition with given admissible control inputs for the system.

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