Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Guidance, navigation, and control
Summary
Guidance, navigation and control (abbreviated GNC, GN&C, or G&C) is a branch of engineering dealing with the design of systems to control the movement of vehicles, especially, automobiles, ships, aircraft, and spacecraft. In many cases these functions can be performed by trained humans. However, because of the speed of, for example, a rocket's dynamics, human reaction time is too slow to control this movement. Therefore, systems—now almost exclusively digital electronic—are used for such control. Even in cases where humans can perform these functions, it is often the case that GNC systems provide benefits such as alleviating operator work load, smoothing turbulence, fuel savings, etc. In addition, sophisticated applications of GNC enable automatic or remote control.
Guidance refers to the determination of the desired path of travel (the "trajectory") from the vehicle's current location to a designated target, as well as desired changes in velocity, rotation and acceleration for following that path.
Navigation refers to the determination, at a given time, of the vehicle's location and velocity (the "state vector") as well as its attitude.
Control refers to the manipulation of the forces, by way of steering controls, thrusters, etc., needed to execute guidance commands while maintaining vehicle stability.
Missile guidance and Precision-guided munition#Types
Guidance, navigation, and control systems consist of 3 essential parts: navigation which tracks current location, guidance which leverages navigation data and target information to direct flight control "where to go", and control which accepts guidance commands to affect change in aerodynamic and/or engine controls.
Navigation is the art of determining where you are, a science that has seen tremendous focus in 1711 with the Longitude prize. Navigation aids either measure position from a fixed point of reference (ex. landmark, north star, LORAN Beacon), relative position to a target (ex. radar, infra-red, ...) or track movement from a known position/starting point (e.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.