Legacy recovery and robust augmentation structured design for the VEGA launcher

Funding information European Space Agency, Networking/Partnering Initiative, Contract Number: 4000114460/15/NL/MH/ats; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Doctoral Training Partnership, Award Number: 1609551 This paper presents a systematic robust control framework based on the structured H∞ approach to address the synthesis of the atmospheric ascent-flight control system of a launch vehicle. To introduce this synthesis framework, the control problem is first formulated to recover the classically-designed baseline rigid-body controller of the actual VEGA launcher VV05 mission. This legacy recovery builds the necessary background for a good understanding of the problem and increases confidence for its transfer to the Space industry. Subsequently, it is shown how to systematically augment the robustness of the design from the synthesis stage against first wind turbulence perturbations and then parametric uncertainty. The resulting controller is verified via classical stability margins and robust structured singular value analyses, and finally validated using nonlinear, time-domain simulations in a Monte Carlo campaign. It is highlighted that this robust synthesis framework allows to obtain a controller with improved robust stability and global performance and more importantly it provides a more systematic methodology for design.

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