SINGLE CHANNEL CONTROL OF A ROLLING MISSILE

Abstract

n this thesis, a missile autopilot design problem has been investigated. The missile is of a rolling airframe type and it is to be controlled with the help of only a single pair of canard surfaces. An additional constraint is that the actuators used with the control surfaces must operate in relay mode. A method of designing autopilot for such a system has been presented which addresses the problem by dividing it into two parts. First part is to design a continuous mode, dual-channel autopilot that is supposed to provide appropriate control when applied on a dual-channel controlled, rolling airframe. The second part is to develop a transformation that would convert this dual-channel control command into a single channel control command which when applied to a single channel controlled airframe would produce the same control force in average over a spin cycle sense. Such a transformation is presented. Autopilot design is carried out using this approach and design is validated through computer simulations with a 6-DOF missile model.