Programme

P.40 -- Posters, VCTP-50

Date: Tuesday, 5 August 2025

Time: 08:30 - 10:00

Controlling displacement of warp drive spaceship system using Proportional–Integral–Derivative controller

Tran Dinh An

HCMC university of Technology and Education

In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre proposed the warp drive engine model, in which a spaceship equipped with such an engine could travel through space by curving spacetime, allowing it to move faster than the speed of light. In this research, I focus on solving the control problem of displacement along a single spatial axis of a spaceship equipped with a warp drive engine, modeled in the Cartesian coordinate system. The analysis is based on the nonlinear differential equation (12) presented in Alcubierre's original paper [1].By employing an approximate linearization method combined with Taylor series expansion, followed by the Laplace transform to derive the transfer function between spacetime curvature and spatial displacement, incorporating assumed mathematical transfer functions for the subsystem components, a generalized transfer function of the entire warp-drive spaceship system is obtained. From this, control theory is applied to design a PID controller, which is a controller that regulates the system based on the error between the reference input and the output variable over time. The PID parameter tuning methods is used for controller design, and mathematical criteria are employed to analyze the stability of the closed-loop system.

Presenter: Trần Đình An