Guidance, navigation and control

"GN&C" redirects here. For the Great Northern and City Railway, see Northern City Line.

Main articles: Guidance system, Missile guidance, Navigation system, Air navigation, Aircraft flight control system, and Flight control surfaces

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 the 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 track guidance commands while maintaining vehicle stability.

GNC systems

GNC systems are found in essentially all autonomous or semi-autonomous systems. These include:

• Autopilots
• Driverless cars, like Mars rovers or those participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge
• Guided missiles
• precision-guided airdrop systems
• Reaction control systems for spacecraft
• Spacecraft launch vehicles.

External links

• AIAA GNC Conference (annual)
• Academic Earth: Aircraft Systems Engineering: Lecture 16 GNC. Phil Hattis - MIT
• Georgia Tech: GNC: Theory and Applications
• NASA Shuttle Technology: GNC
• Boeing: Defense, Space & Security: International Space Station: GNC
• Princeton Satellite Systems: GNC of High-Altitude Airships. Joseph Mueller
• CEAS: EuroGNC Conference

See also

• Guidance system
• Navigation
• Control engineering
• Aeronautics