University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics Seminar Series: Fault-Tolerant Control Strategies for Hypersonic Vehicles in Uncertain Flight Environments

Future hypersonic vehicles are expected to exhibit a high degree of autonomy and resiliency. At the same time, hypersonic flight environments pose significant challenges to onboard controllers that must be addressed in order to meet these future requirements. These challenges stem from uncertainty in aerodynamic and thermal characteristics, the presence of countermeasures, and the wide range of flight environments in which the vehicle operates during a typical mission, among other factors. This talk will highlight the development of several guidance and control algorithms tailored to hypersonic vehicles that optimize control decisions in the presence of uncertainty and adapt the control strategy as the vehicle flight behavior changes. The talk will conclude with a vision for future hypersonics GNC research that is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on new techniques from machine learning, uncertainty quantification, and estimation theory to enable a new generation of highly autonomous and resilient hypersonic vehicles.