A Two-Stage Rapid Trajectory Optimization Algorithm for Hypersonic Entry

A novel two-stage rapid trajectory optimization algorithm is presented to solve the hypersonic entry trajectory optimization problem. To circumvent the issue of initial guess of nonlinear programming (NLP) based methods, and to increase the computation speed of the algorithm to accommodate online applications, a convex optimization based algorithm is designed as an initial trajectory generator, which is the first stage of the two-stage algorithm. The second stage is the NLP-based pseudospectral method. Numerical experiments show that the overall computation time of the two-stage algorithm is much less than that of single pseudospectral method.