A New RLV Navigation System Based on Intelligentized Information Fusion

Abstract

Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV) present the opportunity to reduce the cost of launches and to provide capabilities that are not available at present. Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) technologies are critical for meeting safety/reliability and cost requirements for the next generation of reusable launch vehicle. This becomes clear upon examining the number of expendable launch vehicle failures in recent years. Whereas, the advanced GNC technologies would have saved a RLV with the same failure situation. Due to reusage, RLV will go through many flight phases, such as launching, in orbital flying, reentry and landing, many times. There are very high requirements for autonomy, accuracy, reliability, fault tolerant, light weight and small volume of the RLV GNC system. These characteristics have put forward many challenges to the normal GNC system of a flight vehicle. The advanced RLV GNC technologies will lead to reduced cycle times during vehicle design and to reduced costs associated with demonstrating new payloads and modified vehicles. The GNC technologies will also lead to more robustness to unforeseen circumstances in flight, thereby enhancing safety and reducing risk. In this paper, the goal and characteristics of RLV GNC are outlined, and the current technology efforts are reviewed, and the additional work needed for making this goal a reality is proposed. A new intelligentized fault tolerant multisensor RLV navigation scheme is presented and some simulation works are carried out. The information fusion architecture of the intelligentized fault tolerant multisensor navigation system of RLV is designed. A new information fusion technique integrated Hopfield Neural Network with Kalman Filtering is investigated and applied to the above multisensor navigation system. A simulation platform is set up for verifying the navigation scheme and the algorithm and some simulation results are given. The simulation results show the feasibility of the navigation scheme and validate the algorithm. Finally, the problems still existing are pointed out, and some countermeasures for these problems are analyzed. 54th International Astronautical Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, the International Academy of Astronautics, and the International Institute of Space Law 29 September 3 October 2003, Bremen, Germany IAC-03-A.2.02 Copyright © 2003 by the International Astronautical Federation. All rights reserved.