H-Infinity control of the VEGA Launch Vehicle first stage in presence of roll

Abstract

The VEGA Launch Vehicle of the European Space Agency performed its maiden flight in 2012 with outstanding success. The control laws flown are based on a mixed SISO/MIMO approach using PID with tuning filters plus a gyroscopic term to deal with coupling in presence of non-negligible roll rate. This paper presents a pure MIMO approach based on an H-Infinity controller. The generated controller is compared with the real implementation and performs better in presence of high roll rates.