Automatic Attitude Control of the Launch Vehicles by means of the Backstepping Control Method

This paper tackles the automatic attitude control of the launch vehicles (rocket type), aiming to the design and software validation of an automatic control system for the rockets’ attitude control by means of the backstepping control approach. Considering the nonlinear dynamics of a rocket in vertical plane, as well as the measurement errors of the gyro sensors as internal disturbances, the backstepping control method, Lyapunov theory, and first-order command filters are employed to obtain the system global stability. The theoretical results are software validated through numerical simulations, the accurate tracking of the reference trajectory and the excellent robustness relative to the sensor errors being proved.