Robust Terminal Attitude Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles

Here we define the terminal attitude of the pursuer with respect to a target and present a LQR and H^infin control approach to solving the problem of pursuer achieving a desired terminal attack/approach angle. The intercept or engagement criteria is defined in terms of both minimizing the miss distance and controlling the pursuer´s body attitude with respect to the target at the terminal point. This approach in comparison to previous approaches consider the relativistic approach of the pursuer with respect to the target as opposed the absolute velocities of the two dynamic bodies, and have possible applications ranging from autonomous vehicle entry in to a mother craft to nossle engagements in on-flight refuelling or even in precision missile guidance. Here we also suitably formulate the H^infin control ideas directly applicable to the underlying problem and presents both state feedback and output feed back results for the case of finite horizon and non-zero initial conditions together with a optimal parameter value to achieve a desired terminal characteristic in terms of the original weighting parameters.