2025-07-24 –, Main Room 1 (Main stage)
Aerodynamically-controlled vertical takeoff vertical landing reusable space launch vehicles are of considerable commercial interest. We built a reusable launch vehicle model with aerodynamic and propulsive controls, performed trajectory optimization, and developed an algorithm for approximate nonlinear reachability analysis of the system to identify safe re-ignition points.
Controlling aerodynamically actuated reusable launch vehicles is complicated by their highly nonlinear, underactuated dynamics that require trajectory optimization and model predictive approaches to control well. Previous approaches were either slow and dynamically accurate or fast but missed large and important parts of the dynamics.
We describe the implementation of a model of an axisymmetric aerodynamically-controlled resuable launch vehicle in ModelingToolkit and Julia, including both body and control aerodynamic forces and moments. We use this model to perform both efficient trajectory optimization by reduction to successive convex optimization using JuMP and Clarabel for the resulting 5 degree of freedom system and describe an approach for using that trajectory optimization to perform nonlinear approximate reachability analysis.
Benjamin Chung is a modeling & simulation consultant with JuliaHub. Previously, he was a postdoc at the University of Washington with Behcet Acikmese working on aerospace trajectory optimization after finishing his PhD with Jan Vitek on type systems for Julia.