Pitch Axis Control for a Guided Projectile in a Wind Tunnel-based Hardware-In-the-Loop Setup

International audienceThis article details the design of a pitch axis autopilot for an 80mm fin-stabilized, canard-guidedprojectile and its validation on a Hardware-In-the-Loop test setup. This setup is built around an autonomousprojectile prototype, which is installed in the test section of a wind tunnel by the means of a3-DoF gimbaled structure. The autopilot design is based on a family of linearized dynamic models ofthe projectile, whose parameters were estimated from experimental data. Several control approachesare considered. Using the H1 robust control framework, a full-order disturbance rejection controlleris designed, taking into account the limited actuator dynamics. A fixed-order, fixed-structure controllerof lower complexity with the same performance objective is also designed, using a nonsmoothH1 technique. The tracking performance of these controllers is improved with the addition of a feedforwardcontroller. A final approach considers the disturbance rejection and reference tracking as amulti-objective problem, where the feedback and the feedforward controllers are designed in a singlestep. The performance of these approaches is then assessed and compared using numerical simulationas well as experimental results gathered from the Hardware-In-the-Loop setup