Autopilot Design for Elastic Missile Systems

This paper investigates the design of longitudinal autopilot with servo-elastic problems in elastic missiles. Since many previous static designs of the missile control system treat missile as an absolute rigid body which can no longer meet current actual needs, the slenderness of missile body is considered, and the model of rigid motion with elastic vibration is established for the purpose of practical applications. Moreover, in order to overcome obvious harmful effect of elastic vibration on angular velocity feedback, the amplitude and phase stabilization methods are adopted to deal with the first two modes of vibration in the angular velocity feedback loop, then through compensation for the lever arm effect and other measures to ensure the final performance of the system. Finally, the effectiveness in the design of autopilot with elastic characteristics of the proposed method combining amplitude and phase stabilization is demonstrated with a simulation.