Automated Landing

Problem #169

Tags: space physics simulation c-1 c-0 implementation

Who solved this?

No translations... yet

In the Safe Landing problem we learned how the rocket is controlled manually while landing.

Now you are in charge of the Moon base and one of your principal responsibilities is to guide landing of the approaching ships. These ships have simple automated landing system, so on approach they:

Their landing system works similarly to one described in previous task with the following changes:

So after receiving your response, ship continues flying towards the Moon without starting engines for tf seconds, after this engines are turned on with burning rate of rate0. Further on, this rate is increased by drate after each second elapsed.

Note that at any time burning rate is limited between 0 and 100 (kilograms per second) bounds. E.g. if rate0 is 90 and drate is 1 then 10 second after engines are engaged you reach the rate 100 and then continue with this rate. Also, of course, after fuel is exhausted landing system have no influence on further flight and the ship is again simply in free fall.

E.g. the CPU on board of the ship executes program similar to this:

    # input parameters: free_time, rate_initial, rate_change

    steps = 100
    dt = 1 / steps       # dt will be 0.01 seconds
    t = 0

    while (not_landed) :
        if t >= freeTime :
            rate = rate_initial + rate_change * (t - free_time)
            rate = min(max(rate, 0), 100)
        else :
            rate = 0
        end if

        for i = 0..99 :
            perform_simulation_step(rate, dt)
        end for

        t = t + 1
    end while

You will receive requests from several ships at once - and you should provide them for settings which will allow them to touch down with safe small speed.

So you need to solve a kind of minimization problem (search over parameters to minimize final speed) and there are many ways. For example you may try Gradient Descent with proper scaling of parameters or probably Random Search approach. Any of them may appear bit tricky because of the somewhat specific target function behavior, but some tuning should help. You may even come up with some hybrid version - remember that your goal is to make algorithm fast: obviously it will not do if the ship lands in 3 minutes and your algorithm can only find suitable parameters in twise this time :)

Constant parameters

Input and Output

Input data contain the amount of ships sending request for landing to you (on the first line).
Next lines give four values: m (mass of the ship itself), mf (mass of remaining fuel), h (current altitude), v (current speed).
Answer should return three values for each ship - tf (non-negative integer), rate0 (between 0 and 100) and drate (either positive or negative) in the same order in which requests came.

Example:

input data:
2
6500 7600 200000 1660
5400 7200 210000 1700

answer:
60 69.21 0.000154384 73 85.18 -0.284587568

For this example the first ship lands with the speed v = 2.74 m/s after t = 160.22 sec
and the second one with the speed v = 1.46 m/s after t = 159.01 sec.
This information is provided to you for debugging purpose.

You need to login to get test data and submit solution.