In order to encourage myself to work more regularly on my Master’s thesis, I’ve decided to keep a more-or-less public journal about the effort.

So here is the basic plan behind Control Systems for the Lunar Lander X-Prize Challenge:

• Work through the math for the soft-landing problem;
• Ditto for the attitude control problem; and, if I have enough time,
• Unify the two problems, probably using Geometric Algebra.

Sounds easy, don’t it?

My basic text is Donald E. Kirk’s Optimal Control Theory: An Introduction from the Prentice-Hall Networks series. At the Cooper Union, Professor Shinners used his own Advanced Modern Control System Theory and Design, which whetted my appetite for the subject, but left me dangling when I tried to actually follow his derivations.