ENH: Discrete and Continuous Controllers

[Malmahrouqi3]

Pull request type

• Code changes (bugfix, features)

Checklist

• Tests for the changes have been added (if needed)
• Lint (black rocketpy/ tests/) has passed locally

Current behavior

#274

New behavior

Tested on the Airbrakes Example (docs/user/airbrakes.rst)

(Discrete 10 Hz sampling)
378 Calls
Apogee State
Apogee Time: 22.777 s
Apogee Altitude: 4303.058 m (ASL) | 2903.058 m (AGL)
Apogee Freestream Speed: 15.592 m/s
Apogee X position: -3.803 m
Apogee Y position: 465.747 m
Apogee latitude: 32.9944420°
Apogee longitude: -106.9750388°

Maximum altitude: 2903.06 m

(Discrete 100 Hz sampling)
3776 Calls
Apogee State
Apogee Time: 22.777 s
Apogee Altitude: 4303.008 m (ASL) | 2903.008 m (AGL)
Apogee Freestream Speed: 15.592 m/s
Apogee X position: -3.802 m
Apogee Y position: 465.738 m
Apogee latitude: 32.9944419°
Apogee longitude: -106.9750388°

Maximum altitude: 2903.01 m

(Discrete 1000 Hz sampling)
37758 Calls
Apogee State
Apogee Time: 22.779 s
Apogee Altitude: 4303.448 m (ASL) | 2903.448 m (AGL)
Apogee Freestream Speed: 15.593 m/s
Apogee X position: -3.803 m
Apogee Y position: 465.819 m
Apogee latitude: 32.9944427°
Apogee longitude: -106.9750388°

Maximum altitude: 2903.45 m

(Continuous inf sampling)
744 Calls

Apogee State
Apogee Time: 23.369 s
Apogee Altitude: 4401.779 m (ASL) | 3001.779 m (AGL)
Apogee Freestream Speed: 16.157 m/s
Apogee X position: -4.104 m
Apogee Y position: 488.409 m
Apogee latitude: 32.9946458°
Apogee longitude: -106.9750420°

Maximum altitude: 3001.78 m

(No Controller)
0 Calls
Apogee State
Apogee Time: 25.886 s
Apogee Altitude: 4705.474 m (ASL) | 3305.474 m (AGL)
Apogee Freestream Speed: 20.662 m/s
Apogee X position: -5.543 m
Apogee Y position: 588.779 m
Apogee latitude: 32.9955483°
Apogee longitude: -106.9750574°

Maximum altitude: 3305.47 m

Breaking change

• Yes
• No

Additional information

There is no node creation for continuous controllers hence this step is skipped in flight.py. Instead, they are called in each of the ODE solver step, hence not relying on fixed sampling rate.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 46.15385% with 7 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ Project coverage is 81.07%. Comparing base (9cf3dd4) to head (ccce75d).
⚠️ Report is 72 commits behind head on develop.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
rocketpy/rocket/rocket.py	28.57%	5 Missing ⚠️
rocketpy/simulation/flight.py	60.00%	2 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@             Coverage Diff             @@
##           develop     #946      +/-   ##
===========================================
+ Coverage    80.27%   81.07%   +0.80%     
===========================================
  Files          104      113       +9     
  Lines        12769    14555    +1786     
===========================================
+ Hits         10250    11801    +1551     
- Misses        2519     2754     +235     

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Adds first-class support for discrete (fixed refresh rate) and continuous (called every solver step) controllers to RocketPy’s flight simulation, aligning with the controller architecture discussed in issue #274.

Changes:

• Invoke continuous controllers during the solver stepping loop (instead of via fixed time nodes).
• Add Rocket.add_discrete_controller and Rocket.add_continuous_controller helpers that build _Controller objects with finite vs inf sampling rates.
• Update _Controller to default sampling_rate to math.inf and document the “infinite sampling” behavior.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 8 comments.

File	Description
rocketpy/simulation/flight.py	Calls continuous controllers each solver step and skips time-node creation for sampling_rate=inf.
rocketpy/rocket/rocket.py	Adds Rocket-level APIs to register discrete vs continuous controllers.
rocketpy/control/controller.py	Defaults controller sampling rate to infinity and updates documentation accordingly.

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (1)

rocketpy/control/controller.py:81

• The added note in the docstring exceeds the typical line-length used elsewhere in the project (and likely will be reformatted by Ruff/Black). Please wrap this note to keep docstring formatting consistent/readable, and consider clarifying how sampling_rate=inf interacts with the existing 1/sampling_rate wording in the sampling_rate parameter description.

            .. note:: The function will be called according to the sampling rate
            specified. If unspecified, the default sampling rate is set to infinity, meaning that the
            controller function will be called at every step of the simulation.
        sampling_rate : float
            The sampling rate of the controller function in Hertz (Hz). This
            means that the controller function will be called every
            `1/sampling_rate` seconds.