Longitudinal nonlinear adaptive autopilot design for missiles with control constraint

This paper develops a new nonlinear adaptive longitudinal autopilot for the control of missiles with control input constraint, in the presence of parametric uncertainties and external disturbance input. The objective here is to control the angle of attack of the missile. A saturating control law is derived for the trajectory control of the angle of attack. The control law includes an auxiliary dynamic system in the feedback loop, driven by control input error signal, caused by control saturation, to preserve stability in the closed-loop system. By the Lyapunov stability analysis, it is shown that in the closed-loop system, the system trajectories are uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulation results show that the designed autopilot with constrained input can accomplish accurate trajectory control if the control saturation period is short. It is also seen that although the tracking error increases with the saturation period, the angle of attack tends to zero, once the command input is set to zero. Furthermore this adaptive control system, including the control error signal feedback loop, performs better than the adaptive laws, designed earlier based on immersion and invariance principle, without control magnitude constraint.