Adaptive jitter control for tracker line of sight stabilization

A field test experiment on a range tracking telescope at the U. S. Army's White Sands Missile Range is exploring the use of recently developed adaptive control methods to minimize track loop jitter. Gimbal and platform vibration are the main sources of jitter in the experiments, although atmospheric turbulence also is a factor. In initial experiments, the adaptive controller reduced the track loop jitter significantly in frequency ranges beyond the bandwidth of the existing track loop. This paper presents some of the initial experimental results along with analysis of the performance of the adaptive control loop. The paper also describes the adaptive control scheme, its implementation on the WSMR telescope and the system identification required for adaptive control.