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Variable Structure-Based Nonlinear Missile Guidance/Autopilot Design With

Highly Maneuverable Actuators

Article in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology · December 2004

DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2004.833622 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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944 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2004

Brief Papers_______________________________________________________________________________
Variable Structure-Based Nonlinear Missile Guidance/Autopilot Design With
Highly Maneuverable Actuators
Fu-Kuang Yeh, Kai-Yuan Cheng, and Li-Chen Fu

Abstract—In this brief, we propose a variable structure based Unit vector of .

nonlinear missile guidance/autopilot system with highly maneuver- Magnitude of .
able actuators, mainly consisting of thrust vector control and di- Present time.
vert control system, for the task of intercepting of a theater ballistic
missile. The aim of the present work is to achieve bounded target Torque.
interception under the mentioned 5 degree-of-freedom (DOF) con- Velocity vector.
trol such that the distance between the missile and the target will Exhaust velocity.
enter the range of triggering the missile’s explosion. First, a 3-DOF Angular velocity vector.
sliding-mode guidance law of the missile considering external dis-
turbances and zero-effort-miss (ZEM) is designed to minimize the
distance between the center of the missile and that of the target. A. Subscripts
Next, a quaternion-based sliding-mode attitude controller is devel-
oped to track the attitude command while coping with variation of Body coordinate frame.
missile’s inertia and uncertain aerodynamic force/wind gusts. The Disturbances.
stability of the overall system and ZEM-phase convergence are an- Desired.
alyzed thoroughly via Lyapunov stability theory. Extensive simu- Error.
lation results are obtained to validate the effectiveness of the pro- Gravity.
posed integrated guidance/autopilot system by use of the 5-DOF
inputs. Missile.
Initial time.
Index Terms—Attitude control, bounded target interception,
nonlinear system, quaternion, variable structure. Perpendicular to line-of-sight (LOS).
Divert control.
Target/Thrust.
NOMENCLATURE
Acceleration vector. I. INTRODUCTION
Disturbances vector.
Pitch angle of nozzle.
Yaw angle of nozzle.
Thrust vector.
G ENERALLY speaking, there are two principal phases for
missiles that try to intercept theater ballistic missiles. One
is the midcourse guidance [1], the stage before the missile can
Gravitational acceleration vector. lock onto the target by its own sensor, whose task is to deliver
Moment of inertia matrix. the missile to some place near the target subject to some addi-
Nominal part of . tional conditions, such as suitable velocity or appropriate atti-
Variation of . tude. On the other hand, the homing guidance [2], i.e., the ter-
Distance between nozzle and c.g. minal guidance, will refer to the period after the distance be-
Displacement vector. tween the center of the missile and that of the target is less than
Mass of the missile. some prespecified value, which often leads to a situation where
Derivative of . the sensor on the missile can lock onto the target. Based on the
Magnitude of thrust. concept of the proportional navigation (PN) guidance law, con-
Quaternion. stant bearing guidance is often employed on the intercept mis-
Position vector. siles. Ha and Chong developed a new command to line-of-sight
(CLOS) guidance law for the short-range surface-to-air missile
Manuscript received October 1, 2002; revised December 4, 2003. Manuscript via feedback linearization [3], and then its modified version [4]
received in final form February 9, 2004. Recommended by Associate Editor with improved performance. As for Moon et al. [9], they pro-
P. K. Menon. This work was supported by the National Science, Taiwan, R.O.C., posed the missile guidance law using variable structure con-
under Grant NSC 92-2212-E-002-044.
F.-K. Yeh is with the Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, trol, where the input command is derived under the condition
Taoyuan, 325, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail: yfuk2001@yahoo.com.tw). wherein the target acceleration is treated as an uncertainty. An
K.-Y. Cheng and L.-C. Fu are with the Department of Electrical Engineering adaptive sliding-mode guidance of a homing missile was pre-
and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 106, Taiwan,
R.O.C. (e-mail: lichen@ccms.ntu.edu.tw). sented by Zhou et al. [10] to online estimate some necessary
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2004.833622 parameters so as to provide robustness to the disturbances.
1063-6536/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2004 945

Besides guidance, attitude control is another important issue B. Zero-Effort-Miss Phase

to be addressed for successful missile’s operation. Quaternions Assume that both the missile and the target are moving only
are used in navigation and guidance algorithm to eliminate the with constant gravitational acceleration, i.e.,
singularities present with direction cosine matrices. It is quite
often that quaternion representation has been adopted to de-
scribe the attitude of a spacecraft [5], because it is recognized as
a kind of global attitude representation. To cope with the non-
ideal factors surrounding the spacecraft under attitude control (7)
and to enhance the robustness property of the system, sliding
mode control has been employed by Chen and Lo [6], which was Therefore, the relative position vector and the relative velocity
then followed by a smooth version [7] incorporating a boundary vector at can be, respectively, expressed as
layer as has been proposed by [8] to avoid the chattering phe-
nomenon, but at the price of slightly degrading the tracking ac-
(8)
curacy. A missile equipped with thrust vector control (TVC)
can effectively control its acceleration direction [1] when the Thus, zero-effort-miss (ZEM) can be computed as
missile’s fin fails, which in turn implies that the maneuver-
ability/controllability of the missile can be greatly enhanced
during the stage when the speed of the missile is slow and/or the
air density surrounding the missile is low. In this brief, we in- (9)
vestigate the variable structure (VS)-based missile guidance/au-
topilot problem for a missile equipped with TVC and divert con-
trol system (DCS) so that the intercepting missile is able to ful- If the convergence of is fast enough, the relative velocity will
fill the purpose of successful interception of an inbound target soon almost be lined up with LOS (see Fig. 2) and, hence,
missile in a single intercepting phase. . Apparently, from (9) one can then conclude that ZEM
as , which is our ideal goal.
II. PRELIMINARIES
III. GUIDANCE SYSTEM DESIGN
A. Equations of Motion for Missiles with TVC
The equations of relative motion in terms of the relative po-
The motion of a missile can be described in two parts as fol- sition and the relative velocity are
lows: as follows:
Translation:
and (10)
(1)
where , , and the translation motion of a
Rotation:
missile is defined as (1).
(2) To proceed, we first derive the equation of the relative motion
perpendicular to the LOS ( ) as follows:
where , and all the variables are defined
in the nomenclature.
(11)
After referring to Fig. 1(a)–(c), the force and torque exerted
on the missile can be, respectively, expressed in the body coor-
where and
dinate frame as
.
Referring to (11), an adequate design of is the following:
(3)
(12)

(4) where is a positive definite diag-

where is the aforementioned variable onal matrix, and is a switching function of the sliding mode
moment in the axial direction of the missile. Let the rotation control, which readily yields
matrix denote the transformation from the body coordinate
frame to the inertial coordinate frame. From (1) to (4), the mo- (13)
tion model of the missile can then be written as
Let be a Lyapunov function candidate, and
(5)
evaluate the time derivative of along the trajectories of the
system (13) as follows:
(6) (14)
where and . with (15)

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946 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2004

In theory, it can be verified that the time derivative of a quater-

nion is as

(18)

To demonstrate the robustness of the controller, we allow (2)

and (18) to be subjected to (bounded) input disturbances and
the uncertain quantities and , where ,
. Let the torque input be proposed as

(19)

where , .
, ,2,3, whereas is a sign function, and
is a sliding surface variable defined
as , with . If the
inequality condition shown below can be guaranteed

(20)
Fig. 1. (a) TVC actuator with single nozzle and rolling torque scheme. (b)
Missile’s divert control system (bottom view). (c) Two angles of TVC in body where
coordinate frame.

(21)

whose bounding function is obviously a function of , , ,

and . Here, let the Lyapunov function candidate be set as
.
Fig. 2. Relative velocity between missile and target.
From the sliding-mode theory, once the reaching condi-
tion is satisfied, the system is eventually forced to stay on
the sliding manifold, i.e., , where
where we use the fact . It is evident that if we choose . It has been shown that [2] the system origin
, , 2, 3 and is indeed exponentially stable.
, then (14) becomes Taking the first-order derivative of , we have

(16)

where ( ) is the minimum eigenvalue of . Thus,

via Lyapunov stability theory, we can conclude that the speed (22)
component will gradually diminish before ZEM phase is
reached.
Therefore, it is evident that (22) becomes

IV. AUTOPILOT SYSTEM DESIGN (23)

The attitude of a rigid body may be described in quaternion.
Thus, it can be defined as four parameters involving and , for , where is the minimum eigenvalue of ,
i.e., a positive definite diagonal matrix. As a result, the exponential
stability and robustness of the autopilot system can be achieved.

V. INTEGRATED STABILITY ANALYSIS

To verify the stability of the overall system, we define the
(17)
Lyapunov function candidate of the overall system as

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2004 947

. The first-order time derivative of the Lyapunov function can

be derived as

(24)
Fig. 3. Relative relation diagram in body coordinate.
referring to (14) and (22).
Now, we are ready to state the following theorem which will Accordingly, the desired overall acceleration perpen-
provide conditions under which the proposed overall sliding dicular to the LOS can be derived due to the result in Section III,
mode guidance and autopilot system controlled by TVC, DCS, which together with in the direction leads to the desired
and rolling moment guarantee the stability of the entire system acceleration (see Fig. 3) of the missile, namely
and the target-reaching objective is achieved.
Theorem 1: Let the equation of relative translational motion
perpendicular to LOS and the relative rotational motion be de-
scribed as in (2), (11), and (18), the sliding mode guidance law
be proposed as in (12), the torque input of the autopilot be given Hence, the resulting acceleration of the missile due to TVC
as in (19), and the guidance law be switched to ZEM phase when and DCS together will lie on the plane . We note
. If is such that , where is the the following two facts: 1) projection of the desired resulting
starting time, and is bounded away from zero, then the in- acceleration onto the axis of is simply and
tegrated overall guidance and autopilot systems will drive the 2) projection of onto the axis perpendicular to the plane
missile to enter the ZEM phase eventually so that the bounded will be identically zero. Then, we can derive the
target interception of the integrated system can be achieved. following constraint equations of in the body coordinate
Sketch Proof of Theorem 1: From (24), the expression of frame as:
can be simplified as

(25)

Let the desired acceleration be defined in (12) perpendic-

ular to LOS for the sake of guidance, and let the torque input be By Cramer’s rule, the acceleration [see Fig. 1(b)]
shown in (19) for attitude tracking, where both can be absolutely generated by the divert control system, denoted as
computed. Based on the methodology in the aforementioned, , can be derived as
can be re-expressed as

(26)

which means that is positive definite and, hence, ,

as via use of Lyapunov stability theory before
entering ZEM phase. Due to the derivation of ZEM phase, the
minimum distance between the missile and the target will be
less than the prespecified value during ZEM phase, and
the target will be destroyed by choosing a smaller and
triggering the missile’s explosion when the closest distance be- Remark 1: To avoid the singularity for computing the ,
tween the missile and the target is within the indicated effective we propose one possible solution to modify the force from the
interception range. Finally, to show that Theorem 1 is satisfied, divert control system when the singularity condition “ ”
we need to show that before entering ZEM phase, which occurs as follows:
has been proved in [1]. Therefore, the target-tracking objective
during the flight before entering ZEM phase can be completed and
as derived by the aforementioned proof of theorem 1, but after
the ZEM phase, the principal goal of bounded target intercep- if
tion as claimed by the aforementioned theorem can be achieved.
and

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948 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2004

if

VI. SIMULATION
To validate the proposed sliding-mode guidance and autopilot
of the missile system, we provide a realistic computer simula-
tion in this section. We assume the target is launched from some-
where 600 km far away. The missile has a sampling period of
10 ms. The bandwidth of the TVC is 20 Hz and the two angular
displacements are both limited to 5 . Here, we consider the mis-
sile’s variation of the moment of inertia. Thus, the inertia matrix
and the rate of its variation including the nominal part , and
the uncertain part , used here are as follows:

where

Apparently, all the components of the inertia matrix and its

variation depend on the mass and size of the missile [11], the
specific impulse and fuel mass fraction of the propellant [12].
The attitude’s initial conditions of the missile is set as
, i.e., vertical onto the launch pad,
the missile’s initial angular velocity is as ,
and the variation of missile’s mass is as (kg/s) for the
initial mass (kg) and the specific impulse
(s). Furthermore, we also consider the aerodynamic force and
wind gusts exerted on the missile by including the term
(Nt-m) for the rotation motion
as described in (2) and
( ) for the translation motion as described in (6), for
,2,3, where is the step function. Besides that, we also
check the force which is produced by the divert control system
equipped at the center of gravity.
In numerical simulation, the feasibility of the presented ap-
proach is satisfactorily demonstrated by the results of simula-
tion scenario shown in Fig. 4. The total simulation time of in-
tercepting phase is 109.46 s, and the ZEM phase starts when
Fig. 4. Results of simulation scenario.
the distance between the missile and the target is less than 100
m and lasts for only about 0.02 s. Finally, the shortest distance
at the intercepting point is less than 1 m. The effect of the in- the velocity, 3168.6 m/s, of the target at the final time. On the
tercepting missile can be shown as in Fig. 4(a) and (b) since the other hand, the attitude tracking can be verified by the results of
lower velocity missile intercepts the ballistic missile with higher Fig. 4(c) and (d), which demonstrate successful tracking effects
velocity after entering its reentry phase. The final velocity of the in terms of the quaternion angle and the sliding surface vari-
intercepting missile is 1230.6 m/s, which is almost one-third of able, respectively, for the rotation motion. From Fig. 4(e) and (f),

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2004 949

which show that a relatively larger value of control torque input TABLE I
occurs at the start during the entire flight phase of the missile, SIMULATION SCENARIO
one can conclude that economical power consumption should
be enough to complete the attitude tracking almost throughout
the intercepting period. Finally, the plausible divert acceleration
of DCS, less than , where is the gravitational acceleration,
is shown in Fig. 4(g). In order to strengthen the applicability of
the DCS actuator, we adopt a low-pass filter with bandwidth 5
Hz to limit the response performances of the actuator, and the
desired force of the intercepting missile for the translation mo-
tion remain realistic enough to achieve the satisfactory ballistic
missile interception.

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