Nonlinear H/spl infin/ missile longitudinal autopilot design with thetas-D method

In this paper, a new nonlinear H_infin control technique, called thetas-D H_infin method, is employed to design a missile longitudinal autopilot. The thetas-D H_infin design has the same structure as that of linear H_infin, except that the two Riccati equations that are part of the solution process are state dependent. The thetas-D technique yields suboptimal solutions to nonlinear optimal control problems in the sense that it provides an approximate solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. It is also shown that this method can be used to provide an approximate closed-form solution to the state dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) and consequently reduce the on-line computations associated with the nonlinear H_infin implementation. A missile longitudinal autopilot design demonstrates the capabilities of thetas-D method. This new nonlinear H_infin design also shows favorable results as compared with the linear H design based on the linearized model.