LPV Modeling of the Atmospheric Flight Dynamics of a Generic Parafoil Return Vehicle

TL;DR

This paper develops an LPV model of a generic parafoil return vehicle's atmospheric flight dynamics, enabling better control design by balancing model accuracy and complexity using advanced conversion techniques.

Contribution

It introduces an automated approach to convert nonlinear flight dynamics into an LPV model optimized for control synthesis, incorporating learning-based methods.

Findings

LPV model accurately approximates nonlinear dynamics

Optimized LPV embedding balances complexity and performance

Enhanced suitability for navigation control design

Abstract

Obtaining models that can be used for control is of utmost importance to ensure the guidance and navigation of spacecraft, like a Generic Parafoil Return Vehicle (GPRV). In this paper, we convert a nonlinear model of the atmospheric flight dynamics of an GPRV to a Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) description, such that the LPV model is suitable for navigation control design. Automated conversion methods for nonlinear models can result in complex LPV representation, which are not suitable for controller synthesis. We apply several state-of-the-art techniques, including learning based approaches, to optimize the complexity and conservatism of the LPV embedding for an GPRV. The results show that we can obtain an LPV embedding that approximates the complex nonlinear dynamics sufficiently well, where the balance between complexity, conservatism and model performance is optimal.