An Introduction to Trajectory Optimization: How to Do Your Own Direct Collocation

This paper is an introductory tutorial for numerical trajectory optimization with a focus on direct collocation methods. These methods are relatively simple to understand and effectively solve a wide variety of trajectory optimization problems. Throughout the paper we illustrate each new set of concepts by working through a sequence of four example problems. We start by using trapezoidal collocation to solve a simple one-dimensional toy problem and work up to using Hermite--Simpson collocation to compute the optimal gait for a bipedal walking robot. Along the way, we cover basic debugging strategies and guidelines for posing well-behaved optimization problems. The paper concludes with a short overview of other…

• NS
  National Science Foundation