ROBUST NONLINEAR MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL FOR AGILE INTERCEPTOR MISSILES

For effective operation of agile interceptor missiles to intercept highly maneuverable anti-ship targets at widely varying altitudes, the control system design for autopilots must be nonlinear, robust, and must explicitly take into account hard limits on the magnitude and rates of control surface deflections. Towards this end, we developed a robust nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (MFC) for a Navy agile interceptor missile and demonstrated its capability as a viable approach for missile autopilot design. The nonlinear MFC design explicitly handles hard limits on control surface deflections and safety limits. It generalizes the approaches based on feedback linearization or dynamic inversion from single step control to multiple step control over a receding prediction horizon. The nonlinear MFC autopilot has been demonstrated to provide outstanding performance at different angles-of-attack and for different set of guidance commands. Monte-Carlo simulations were performed to illustrate the robustness of the MFC-based autopilot design to handle large aerodynamic uncertainties.