Okay, so the beta release on Sunday/Monday didn't happen as expected. I ended up running into a number of features I wanted to get in and those took a few more days than expected to write. As things stands now, I actually do still have two or three more minor functions to code up. It shouldn't be long now, though.
That said, I wanted to show some screenshots of the interface and of the application in action. Call it a demonstration of what's to come. Up first:
This is the main user interface. The upper box shows a trajectory, just computed, swinging around a number of planets. The lower box shows the text output of the program and gives details on arrival/departure information, deltaV, etc. Spacecraft trajectory is shown in white (dashed line). You can see here that the tool did fairly well in finding a decent trajectory to Jupiter using a Venus flyby: only about 11 m/s of powered dV needed at Venus to make the transfer, and the launch vehicle only has to supply ~37 km^2/sec^2 of C3 energy to the spacecraft on Earth departure.
The ToT version 2 uses a genetic algorithm to minimize a trajectory cost function that is partially user definable. Output from the genetic algorithm can be monitored to determine how well it is doing in finding an optimum solution, and settings can be changed to improve results as necessary. This screenshot shows the current value of all the "individuals" in the "population" of solutions that are currently being evolved by the algorithm.
Entering a flight plan to optimize is fairly straight-forward and similar in many respects to version 1.x of the ToT.
The ability to generate porkchop plots is still a prime function of the ToT. Arrival velocity may also be computed. The genetic algorithm will output this plots if you ask it to, and in addition, special tools (such as the one shown here) exist in the program for computing the plots independently of any optimization run.
Finally, the output plots can be customized to some extent.
Any thoughts?
---------- Post added 08-11-11 at 12:38 PM ---------- Previous post was 08-10-11 at 04:56 PM ----------
Alright, the first test release of version 2.0 is up and running! At the moment there's no documentation as I still need to rewrite the version 1 docs for inclusion here. Other than that, this should be the complete package. I have a few other features I want to include, but they can wait for a bit.
Download links are as follows:
Trajectory Optimization Toolbox W/ MATLAB Component Runtime (~194 MB)
Trajectory Optimization Toolbox W/O MATLAB Component Runtime (~20 MB)
Download the ZIP, unpack into a new folder, and run trajOptTool2.exe. If you don't have the MATLAB component runtime from the previous releases of TOT, get the ZIP file with the MCR. Otherwise, you can grab the smaller package without the MCR. You'll have to play around with it for now, as like I said, no documentation has been written yet. Of course, I'm open to questions.
Once the documentation gets written, it'll go up on OHM permanently, but I didn't want to waste Vash's space with a "beta" version, so to speak.
(NOTE: It may be a minute or two yet until the files finish uploading. If you get broken ZIPs, come back in half an hour.
)