Attitude control of a small conventional launcher

In this paper the attitude control problem for the small launch vehicle VEGA is discussed. In particular, a direct optimisation method is applied to the determination of the parameters of a prescribed mission trajectory, in order to compute a reference pitch attitude angle time history. The attitude and engine-thrusters control system, which allows to track the obtained reference attitude, are designed by using a fuzzy logic approach. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated via simulation performed into the MATLAB/spl trade//SIMULINK/spl trade/ environment.