Optimal Control Course
Master optimal control through designing fuel-efficient vertical rocket landings. Gain skills in modeling dynamics, setting constraints, applying Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle, and using numerical methods like indirect shooting and direct transcription to create robust control strategies for real-world engineering challenges in aerospace and beyond.

from 4 to 360h flexible workload
valid certificate in your country
What will I learn?
This course teaches modeling of 1D vertical rocket dynamics with realistic constraints and phase-space analysis for safe, fuel-efficient landings. Learners apply Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle, construct Hamiltonians, manage costates, solve boundary value problems via indirect shooting and direct transcription, and explore practical extensions for implementing optimal control in actual systems.
Elevify advantages
Develop skills
- Build 1D rocket models by deriving, scaling, and constraining vertical dynamics for control.
- Design fuel-optimal landings by posing and solving Pontryagin-based control problems quickly.
- Analyze bang-bang controls by computing switching times and phase-space trajectories.
- Apply numerical optimal control using shooting, collocation, and mesh refinement in practice.
- Translate theory to hardware by handling delays, noise, limits, and safety envelopes.
Suggested summary
Before starting, you can change the chapters and the workload. Choose which chapter to start with. Add or remove chapters. Increase or decrease the course workload.What our students say
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