Design and Analysis of Morpheus Lander Flight Control System

The Morpheus Lander is a vertical takeoff and landing test bed vehicle developed to demonstrate the system performance of the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) system capability for the integrated autonomous landing and hazard avoidance system hardware and software. The Morpheus flight con...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI). Conference Proceedings
Main Authors Jang, Jiann-Woei, Yang, Lee, Fritz, Mathew, Nguyen, Louis H, Johnson, Wyatt R, Hart, Jeremy J
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Hampton NASA/Langley Research Center 04.08.2014
Subjects
Attitude control
Attitude stability
Autonomous navigation
Computer simulation
Control stability
Control systems
Control systems design
Design engineering
Design optimization
Dynamic stability
Flight control systems
Rigid structures
Rigid-body dynamics
Robustness (mathematics)
Stability analysis
Vertical landing
Vertical takeoff
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Summary:The Morpheus Lander is a vertical takeoff and landing test bed vehicle developed to demonstrate the system performance of the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) system capability for the integrated autonomous landing and hazard avoidance system hardware and software. The Morpheus flight control system design must be robust to various mission profiles. This paper presents a design methodology for employing numerical optimization to develop the Morpheus flight control system. The design objectives include attitude tracking accuracy and robust stability with respect to rigid body dynamics and propellant slosh. Under the assumption that the Morpheus time-varying dynamics and control system can be frozen over a short period of time, the flight controllers are designed to stabilize all selected frozen-time control systems in the presence of parametric uncertainty. Both control gains in the inner attitude control loop and guidance gains in the outer position control loop are designed to maximize the vehicle performance while ensuring robustness. The flight control system designs provided herein have been demonstrated to provide stable control systems in both Draper Ares Stability Analysis Tool (ASAT) and the NASA/JSC Trick-based Morpheus time domain simulation.