Design of missile roll autopilot using uncertainty and disturbance estimation

Design of roll autopilots for missiles requiring roll position stabilisation is an important task. Classical designs with conservative stability margins may result into poor performance. Designs based on modern control approaches, on the other hand, require exact model and may need knowledge of some characteristics of the disturbances acting on the system. Control design based on the Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimation (UDE) offers some remedies to these issues. In this paper, a roll autopilot is designed based on the UDE approach, wherein, the effect of disturbances acting on the system is estimated in real time and control efforts are generated to compensate for the same. Closed loop stability of the system under the UDE controller is established. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.