Trajectory Optimization of Complex Air Vehicles

Hypersonic glide vehicles can travel from London to LA in less than thirty minutes through a complicated swiss-cheese-like flyable region. This region comes from physical objects such as the ground or mountains, or from structural constraints, such as thermal and lateral acceleration limits. To use this platform, trajectories must be designed which can strike a target on the other side of the planet with accuracy and precision. However, hypersonic glide vehicles are a careful balance of weight, payload, rigidity and strength. This means that their employment relies on near-perfect implementation from vehicle design to trajectory generation. For this thesis, the mathematical theory of optimization is used to generate perfect trajectories, which verifiably minimize negative parameters (such as time to target), while maximizing positive parameters (such as impact velocity)