Initial Guess Generation for Aircraft Landing Trajectory Optimization
Panagiotis Tsiotras, Efstathios Bakolas, Yiming Zhao · 2011
We present a semi-analytic framework for the generation of initial guesses for the numerical solution of the landing trajectory optimization problem of an aircraft. Our approach consists of the following tasks: First, we introduce a geometric framework for the generation of length-suboptimal, curvature-constrained, threedimensional curves, which satisfy the following requirements: 1) the projection of the curves on the horizontal plane correspond to Dubins-like paths, and 2) an aircraft traveling along these curves is descending continuously until it reaches its final destination. Subsequently, we generate a time-parametrization of the geometric path such that the control inputs required to traverse the geometric path do not exceed the control limits of the aircraft. The resulting time-parameterized path along with the control input time histories is subsequently fed as an initial guess into a numerical optimal control solver, such as the one introduced in Ref. [1]. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of employing the proposed initial guess generation scheme in terms of convergence of the numerical landing trajectory generation.