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INTRODUCTION
Keywords. Navigation, Guidance, Control
A ight vehicle, regardless of whether it is a missile, an aircraft, or a
launch vehicle, needs the help of human intelligence in achieving its mission.
This human intelligence manifests itself in various forms like gathering information about ight conditions, generating appropriate commands to the
ight vehicle, and designing equipments to interpret these commands and
translate them into action onboard. Each ight vehicle has a mode of operation which might dier from another. For example, in a missile or a launch
vehicle, information is gathered by various sensors and conveyed to a computer which then takes appropriate decisions. In an aircraft it is usually the
human pilot who takes decisions based upon similar information.
Irrespective of the kind of ight vehicle, the theory behind the design and
analysis of all these tasks eventually emanates from a branch of applied mathematics called control theory. The application of control theory to aerospace
may be divided into four areas.
Flight Planning : The determination of a nominal ight path and associated control histories for a given ight vehicle to accomplish specied
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