Anti-Windup Robust Backstepping Control for an Underactuated Reusable Launch Vehicle

Abstract

The attitude control of an underactuated reusable launch vehicle (RLV) in the reentry phase involving nonminimum phase problem and control input constraints is investigated in this article. To address the nonminimum phase problem, an approach combining output redefinition and robust backstepping is proposed, where a synthetic output is constructed using the combination of the original output and the internal states to obtain stable zero dynamics, and then robust backstepping is performed on the new output. Besides, the ideal internal dynamics are obtained by using optimal bounded inversion, which are incorporated into the controller as the reference trajectories for the internal states to improve the output tracking accuracy. To cope with the control input constraints, a simple and useful anti-windup strategy is proposed by using feedback error clipping, which is shown to be very effective in mitigating control input saturation. Numerical simulations are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.