Autocommander: A Supervisory Controller for Integrated Guidance and Control for the 2nd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle

This paper presents a hierarchical architecture for integrated guidance and control that achieves risk and cost reduction for NASA's 2d generation reusable launch vehicle (RLV). Guidance, attitude control, and control allocation subsystems that heretofore operated independently will now work cooperatively under the coordination of a top-level autocommander. In addition to delivering improved performance from a flight mechanics perspective, the autocommander is intended to provide an autonomous supervisory control capability for traditional mission management under nominal conditions, G&C reconfiguration in response to effector saturation, and abort mode decision-making upon vehicle malfunction. This high-level functionality is to be implemented through the development of a relational database that is populated with the broad range of vehicle and mission specific data and translated into a discrete event system model for analysis, simulation, and onboard implementation. A Stateflow Autocoder software tool that translates the database into the Stateflow component of a Matlab/Simulink simulation is also presented.