Guidance, Control and Navigation for Aerospace Systems: Charles Stark Draper's influence on a Personal Perspective

Abstract

From a personal historical perspective, guidance, control, and navigation algorithms and their implementation into various classes of aerospace vehicles are described within the context of the prevalent system theoretic issues. This personal history is shown to be highly influenced by Charles Stark Draper, through his activities as Head of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department and his Instrumentation Laboratory. The focus will be on the development of theory which led to actual flight tests or fielded systems. These developments include matrix optimization methods applied to the autonomous navigation system for Apollo, the evolution of modern control methods for guidance of the Patriot missile and of the synthesis of a multi-input/multi-output flight control compensator for the AFTI-F16, the development of model based fault detection, isolation, and identification schemes with application to the California PATH (Partners for Advanced Transportation TecHnology), and the development of relative navigation system based on differential carrier phase GPS, tested on F-18s at NASA Dryden. I. In the BeginningWhen I was an undergraduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, Doc Draper was the Department Head. Doc Draper instituted into the curriculum a course in classical control that I took in the spring of 1959. I took this course from Professor Walter McKay in my junior year, never noting that he and Draper wrote an early book on classical control. 1 This book, possibly the first comprehensive text on classical control, organized this new technology for engineers to understand and apply such topics as transfer functions, root locus, Bode plots, the Nyquist criterion, Routh-Hurwitz stability criteria, and gain and phase margin for robust control design. Even more astounding was a three week period spent on stochastic processes based on power spectral density, given by Wally Van Dervelde. I was sufficiently inspired that I took a graduate course in applications of control to aeronautical system in my senior year and wrote my undergraduate thesis on the application of the Bushaw minimum time problem to the control of the lateral motion of an aircraft. This began my long career in system and control theory.After graduation from MIT, I went to work for the Boeing Company in Seattle, starting in August, 1960. Although my direct boss was not a controls specialist, my lead engineer, Raymond (Ray) Morth, was excited and grew knowledgeable about the control theories that were emerging in the late 50's and very early 60's. From Ray I learned about the work of Rudolf Kalman, especially his extension of the Wiener filter to linear time-varying systems; Richard Bellman, whose development of dynamic programming extended Hamilton-Jacobi theory to stochastic systems, L. S. Pontryagin, whose development of the maximum principle generalized the Weierstrass condition, Halcombe Laning and Richard Battin, who wrote about constructing Earth-Moon trajectories, and Arthur Bryson and Henry Kelley, who were inde...