Integrated Roll-Pitch-Yaw Autopilot via Equivalent Based Sliding Mode Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Time-Varying Missile

This paper presents an integrated roll-pitch-yaw autopilot using an equivalent based sliding mode control for skid-to-turn nonlinear time-varying missile system with lumped disturbances in its six-equations of motion. The considered missile model are developed to integrate the model uncertainties, external disturbances, and parameters perturbation as lumped disturbances. Moreover, it considers the coupling effect between channels, the variation of missile velocity and parameters, and the aerodynamics nonlinearity. The presented approach is employed to achieve a good tracking performance with robustness in all missile channels simultaneously during the entire flight envelope without demand of accurate modeling or output derivative to avoid the noise existence in the real missile system. The proposed autopilot consisting of a two-loop structure, controls pitch and yaw accelerations, and stabilizes the roll angle simultaneously. The Closed loop stability is studied. Numerical simulation is provided to evaluate performance of the suggested autopilot and to compare it with an existing autopilot in the literature concerning the robustness against the lumped disturbances, and the aforesaid considerations. Finally, the proposed autopilot is integrated in a six degree of freedom flight simulation model to evaluate it with several target scenarios, and the results are shown.