Practical solution to attitude control within wide envelope.

Purpose – This paper aims to present a fast, economical and practical attitude control design approach for flight vehicles operating within wide envelopes. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a linear disturbance observer, an enhanced proportional-derivative (PD) control scheme is proposed. Utilizing the data from the onboard gyro, the observer can treat the entire response of the system, with the exception of the control term, as a disturbance, and use the estimation of the disturbance to cancel out this response and thereby to effectively simplify the control channel. Using the stability margin tester, the explicit graphical tuning rules are given in a consistent way for the longitudinal dynamics based on the induction method. Mathematical simulations are performed for a highly maneuverable flight vehicle to test the proposed method, which are compared with the traditional PD and H8 control algorithms. Findings – The proposed strategy for attitude control can be reformulated as a static-dynamic control algorithm and the robust synthesis method can be employed to determine the control parameters according to a specific performance configuration. The remarkable control performance robustness can be achieved as shown in the comparative simulations. Practical implications – There is a sole parameter, steady gain, needed to be scheduled and it can be estimated with a high accuracy. Originality/value – This paper applies the linear active disturbance rejection control scheme to flight control scenario. The proposed method can reduce the design and implementation complexity of attitude control for flight vehicles operating within a wide envelope, which originates from diverse time-varying flight dynamics. The new method converts the attitude control problem to a sole parameter gain scheduling problem, and there is no complicated and time-consuming multi-dimension interpolation needed for the control parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]