Analysis of control and guidance of rolling missiles with a single plane of control fins

Abstract

The present paper addresses the problem of designing autopilot and guidance control scheme for a missile that has a sustained roll rate and with a single plane of actuated canard fins. Given some assumptions, the development of the equations of motion for a rolling missile shows that when two pairs of fins are actuated, fin control deflection can be computed relative to a nonrolling system and then transformed to the body-fixed reference system. The missile response in the non-rolling system is then the same as that of a non-rotating missile. With a single plane of actuated fins, the missile response is approximately equal to the missile with two planes of control but with control effect reduced in half and an additional disturbance on the commanded value modulated at twice the roll frequency. Closed loop behavior is similar but a practical limitation of the closedloop bandwidth appears. Simulation runs are presented to validate the results.