Robust Design of H-infinity Controller for a Launch Vehicle Autopilot against Disturbances

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust H-infinity controller design for a launch vehicle autopilot, demonstrating excellent disturbance rejection and accurate trajectory tracking during atmospheric flight.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel H-infinity control design for launch vehicle autopilots that accounts for time-varying dynamics and enhances robustness against disturbances.

Findings

Controller achieves stable maneuvering and accurate tracking.

Experimental results show high disturbance rejection performance.

System robustness against disturbances is confirmed.

Abstract

Atmospheric flight phase of a launch vehicle is utilized to evaluate the performance of an H-infinity controller in the presence of disturbances. Dynamics of the vehicle is linearly modeled using time-varying parameters. An operating point was found to design a robust command tracker using H-infinity control theory that guarantees a stable maneuver. At the end, the controller was employed on the launch vehicle to assess the capability of control design on the linearized aerospace vehicle. Experimental results illustrate the excellent performance of the H-infinity controller and accurate tracking implemented by the autopilot. Also the robustness of the entire system against disturbances is demonstrated to be acceptable.