Advanced Motion Planning and Control in Aerospace Applications

Dear Colleagues,

A key trait of an atmospheric or space flight vehicle is the ability to autonomously plan its own motion trajectory and track the trajectory afterwards in order to accomplish specified flight tasks via jointly applying motion planning and control algorithms. The motion planning and control technique with strong autonomy, high safety, and high accuracy is the key to ensuring the success of flight tasks. In aerospace applications, the flight vehicle is usually required to operate in a complex environment without any collision with obstacles, whilst complying with some underlying motion and physical constraints, such as actuator input saturation, sensor pointing constraints, linear/angular velocity constraints, etc. Even though considerable progress has been made in the field of constrained motion planning, most of the existing methods are susceptible to model uncertainties and have limited constraint-handling capability, which may cause safety issues or, even worse, lead to mission failure. From a control perspective, the flight control systems may be subjected to parameter uncertainties, internal/external disturbances, actuator saturation, and faults, which necessitate the design of safe, reliable, and high-performance tracking controllers. A significant challenge arises when some of those issues are treated simultaneously. Moreover, certain transient and steady-state tracking performance demands further increase the difficulty of designing flight controllers. Despite recent advances, further study is needed to develop advanced motion planning and control methods with enhanced autonomy, safety, robustness, and constraint-handling capability for aerospace applications. This Special Issue aims to gather a collection of research papers and survey papers that can reflect the recent theoretical and technological advances in motion planning and control theory that have highly impacted aerospace engineering. The broad fields of motion planning and control methodologies and applications in aerospace systems are the major areas covered, together with connections to artificial intelligence, information theory, game theory, and other emerging technologies. 

Dr. Caisheng Wei
Dr. Xiaodong Shao
Dr. Kenan Yong
Dr. Zeyang Yin
Guest Editors

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