Selected papers from the 12th IFAC Symposium, held in Ottobrunn, Germany, September 1992, address topics in the areas of guidance, navigation, and control of aerospace vehicles; parallel processing architectures for aerospace applications; GNC development life cycle experiments; new development in aerospace guidance and control; space robotics and manipulators; intelligent autonomous vehicles; dynamics and control of flexible aerospace structures modeling, control, and experimental verification; control challenges from space and ground based astronomical telescopes; trajectories optimization and guidance for ascent and descent; and emerging new technologies in sensors, actuators, and on-board processing. Reproduced from typescripts. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Space vehicles have become increasingly complex in recent years, and the number of missions has multiplied as a result of extending frontiers in the exploration of our planetary system and the universe beyond. The advancement of automatic control in aerospace reflects these developments. Key areas covered in these proceedings include: the size and complexity of spacecrafts and the increasingly stringent performance requirements to be fulfilled in a harsh and unpredictable environment; the merger of space vehicles and airplanes into space planes to launch and retrieve payloads by reusable winged vehicles; and the demand to increase space automation and autonomy to reduce human involvement as much as possible in manned, man-tended and unmanned missions. This volume covers not only the newly evolving key technologies but also the classical issues of guidance, navigation and control.
