Section: Research Program

Trajectory optimization

The so-called direct methods consist in an optimization of the trajectory, after having discretized time, by a nonlinear programming solver that possibly takes into account the dynamic structure. So the two main problems are the choice of the discretization and the nonlinear programming algorithm. A third problem is the possibility of refinement of the discretization once after solving on a coarser grid.

In the full discretization approach, general Runge-Kutta schemes with different values of control for each inner step are used. This allows to obtain and control high orders of precision, see Hager [73] , Bonnans [54] . In an interior-point algorithm context, controls can be eliminated and the resulting system of equation is easily solved due to its band structure. Discretization errors due to constraints are discussed in Dontchev et al. [66] . See also Malanowski et al. [87] .

In the indirect approach, the control is eliminated thanks to Pontryagin's maximum principle. One has then to solve the two-points boundary value problem (with differential variables state and costate) by a single or multiple shooting method. The questions are here the choice of a discretization scheme for the integration of the boundary value problem, of a (possibly globalized) Newton type algorithm for solving the resulting finite dimensional problem in ${IR}^n$ ($n$ is the number of state variables), and a methodology for finding an initial point.

For state constrained problems or singular arcs, the formulation of the shooting function may be quite elaborate [52] , [53] , [46] . As initiated in [70] , we focus more specifically on the handling of discontinuities, with ongoing work on the geometric integration aspects (Hamiltonian conservation).