Missile Autopilot Design for Agile Turn Control During Boost-Phase

This paper presents the air-to-air missile autopilot design for a 180° heading reversal maneuver during boost-phase. The missile’s dynamics are linearized at a set of operating points for which angle of attack controllers are designed to cover an extended flight envelope. Then, angle of attack controllers are designed for this set of points, utilizing a pole-placement approach. The controllers’ gains in the proposed configuration are computed from aerodynamic coefficients and design parameters in order to satisfy designer-chosen criteria. These design parameters are the closed-loop frequency, damping ratio, and time constant; these represent the characteristics of the control system. To cope with highly nonlinear and rapidly time varying dynamics during boost-phase, the global gain-scheduled controller is obtained by interpolating the controllers’ gains over variations of the angle of attack, Mach number, and center of gravity. Simulation results show that the proposed autopilot design provides satisfactory performance and possesses good [ed: or “sufficient” or “excellent”] capabilities.