Advances in Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control

Book excerpt: Following the successful 1st CEAS (Council of European Aerospace Societies) Specialist Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control (CEAS EuroGNC) held in Munich, Germany in 2011, Delft University of Technology happily accepted the invitation of organizing the 2nd CEAS EuroGNC in Delft, The Netherlands in 2013. The goal of the conference is to promote new advances in aerospace GNC theory and technologies for enhancing safety, survivability, efficiency, performance, autonomy and intelligence of aerospace systems using on-board sensing, computing and systems. A great push for new developments in GNC are the ever higher safety and sustainability requirements in aviation. Impressive progress was made in new research fields such as sensor and actuator fault detection and diagnosis, reconfigurable and fault tolerant flight control, online safe flight envelop prediction and protection, online global aerodynamic model identification, online global optimization and flight upset recovery. All of these challenges depend on new online solutions from on-board computing systems. Scientists and engineers in GNC have been developing model based, sensor based as well as knowledge based approaches aiming for highly robust, adaptive, nonlinear, intelligent and autonomous GNC systems. Although the papers presented at the conference and selected in this book could not possibly cover all of the present challenges in the GNC field, many of them have indeed been addressed and a wealth of new ideas, solutions and results were proposed and presented. For the 2nd CEAS Specialist Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control the International Program Committee conducted a formal review process. Each paper was reviewed in compliance with good journal practice by at least two independent and anonymous reviewers. The papers published in this book were selected from the conference proceedings based on the results and recommendations from the reviewers.