Modeling, Identification and Control of a Guided Projectile in a Wind Tunnel

This work presents a novel methodology for flight control law design and evaluation, using a functional prototype installed in a wind tunnel by the means of a support structure allowing multiple rotational degrees of freedom. This setup provides an environment allowing experimental characterization of the munition’s behavior, as well as for flight control law evaluation in realistic conditions. The design and validation of pitch and yaw autopilots for a fin-stabilized, canard-guided projectile is investigated, at fixed and variable airspeeds. Modeling such a system leads to a nonlinear model depending on numerous flight conditions such as the airspeed and incidence angles. Linearization-based gain scheduling techniques are widely employed in the industry for controlling this class of systems. To this end, the system is represented with a family of linear models whose parameters are directly estimated from experimentally collected data. Observation of the projectile’s behavior for different operating points indicates the airspeed can be considered as the only scheduling variable. Controller synthesis is performed using a multi-objective, fixed-order, fixed-structure H∞ technique in order to guarantee the stability and robustness of the closed-loop against operating point uncertainty. The obtained control laws are validated with robustness analysis techniques and are then implemented on the experimental setup, where wind-tunnel tests results correlate with numerical simulations and conform to the design specifications.