L1 Adaptive Augmentation of a Missile Autopilot

Abstract

An L1 control augmentation is developed based on a novel autopilot structure for a highly agile, tail-controlled missile. The autopilot is designed to control the pitch and yaw accelerations in the body-fixed frame while maintaining a desired roll angle. In order to compensate for the undesirable effects of modeling uncertainty, an L1 adaptive controller with piece-wise constant adaptation laws is developed that explicitly takes into account the multi-loop dynamic structure of the autopilot. The benefits of the augmented design are demonstrated via Monte-Carlo simulations of a high-fidelity 6DOF missile model, in which a wide spectrum of uncertainty combinations is considered.