Autopilot design for highly maneuvering STT missiles via singular perturbation-like technique

This paper presents a new approach to acceleration control of skid-to-turn (STT) missiles, in which all nonlinearities of the missiles including the coupling effect between pitch and yaw channels due to the effect of bank angle are taken into account. Missile velocity and air density are not assumed to be constant or slow-varying. Furthermore, the total angle of attack need not be confined to be small for autopilot stability. We show that the missile dynamics with missile acceleration as the output, which are of nonminimum phase, can be transformed through a kind of partial linearization and singular perturbation technique into a reduced system which is not only of minimum phase but also exactly input-output (I/O) linearizable via feedback. We present rigorous stability analysis as well as various simulation results. Our method is useful for the autopilot design of highly maneuvering STT missiles