A nonlinear roll-yaw missile autopilot based on plant inversion and PD-spectral assignment

This paper presents the design of a roll-yaw autopilot for a non-axisymmetric missile model to robustly decouple roll tracking from yaw regulation. This method is based on trajectory linearization and consists of the design of two controller sub-sections. The first of which is designed to put the missile on the desired trajectory by inverting the nonlinear plant. The second is a PD-spectrum assignment controller, which exponentially stabilizes the linearized tracking error dynamics. This is a systematic design method which is applicable to uniformly completely controllable MIMO nonlinear time-varying systems, and is an extension of previous results on SISO designs for the pitch autopilot. After a brief background on PD-spectrum and the particular nonlinear plant is presented, the design is shown with some encouraging simulation results