Model Free Adaptive Attitude Control for a Launch Vehicle

For launch vehicles, many traditional control methods are facing the challenge of modeling due to various perturbations and large-scale change of structural parameters existed during the launching process. With the features of simple structure and adaptive tracking, Model-free Adaptive Control (MFAC), as one of the data-driven control methods, is firstly used to design the attitude controller with the restrictions on control inputs for a launch vehicle in this paper. By virtue of the virtual dynamic linearization data model of the launch vehicle, the attitude controller can be designed just depending on the input-output data of the launch vehicle without requirement of any physical model. Simulation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of MFAC method by comparing with PID method under the circumstance with the engine failures.