Control and Simulation of an Autonomous Lunar Lander
Corey A. Ippolito, Jeremy Frank · AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference · 2009
The Autonomous Lunar Demonstrator (ALDER) project was developed at NASA Ames Research Center to demonstrate autonomous decision making on a Lunar lander spacecraft capable of performing autonomous hop maneuvers. Towards these objectives, a conceptual spacecraft design was created to accomplish the mission, a simulation environment was developed, and a control system was designed and implemented to control the spacecraft in response to and integrated with a suite of agents in a higher level autonomy architecture. This paper presents the design of the control system for this autonomous vehicle that can respond to the demands of the higher level reasoning algorithms, and describes the simulation model and environment created to test and demonstrate the conceptual mission.