Practical solution to attitude control within wide envelope

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to present a fast, economical and practical attitude control design approach for flight vehicles operating within wide envelopes. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a linear disturbance observer, an enhanced proportional-derivative (PD) control scheme is proposed. Utilizing the data from the onboard gyro, the observer can treat the entire response of the system, with the exception of the control term, as a disturbance, and use the estimation of the disturbance to cancel out this response and thereby to effectively simplify the control channel. Using the stability margin tester, the explicit graphical tuning rules are given in a consistent way for the longitudinal dynamics based on the induction method. Mathematical simulations are performed for a highly maneuverable flight vehicle to test the proposed method, which are compared with the traditional PD and H8 control algorithms. Findings – The proposed strategy for attitude control can be reformulated as a static-dynamic contr...