Guidance, Navigation & Control

Overview

Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) refers to a branch in aerospace engineering interested in designing systems that track and manage the movement of vehicle, like aircrafts, drones, rockets, missiles, and satellites.
As the name indicates, it can be divided into 3 majors areas, listed below in order of hierarchical logic:

• Guidance: calculate where the vehicle needs to go and generate the optimal trajectory to reach that destination
• Navigation: determine where the vehicle is and how it is moving by analyzing data from different sensors. In other words, it deals with the state (position and attitude) estimation of the vehicle via sensor fusion
• Control: determine the control commands needed to execute the guidance trajectory