Missile longitudinal autopilot design using backstepping approach

The tactical missile autopilot design process is detailed from a backstepping control perspective. Wherein, two autopilot topologies are proposed, i.e. the angle of attack (AOA) autopilot and acceleration autopilot. The nonlinear missile longitudinal dynamics is dealt with firstly to meet the strict feedback form. Control parameters of AOA autopilot are introduced in turn and required to be positive real numbers during the recursive process, however, act with some combination form in the final law. Thus a set of new parameters is presented to simplify the expression and disclose the conservatism of the aforementioned autopilot design. The results show that the positive real requirement on AOA autopilot parameters during step by step design has an unfavorable effect on closed loop system performance. An acceleration autopilot as a tracking problem is then set up and developed. On the one hand, the derivative of measured acceleration containing much noise is included in the law, which is thus not benefit to practical implementation. On the other hand, it's hard to transform the design parameters in the control formula into a compact form similar to the case of AOA autopilot. Two control gains, i.e. k