Title: Optimal acceleration autopilot design for non-minimum phase missiles using evolutionary algorithms

Authors: Vahid Bijani; Alireza Khosravi; Pouria Sarhadi

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Mazandaran, Iran ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Mazandaran, Iran ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Mazandaran, Iran

Abstract: The flight control system is a key element to achieve required performance in missiles and aircrafts. First purpose of flight control system is to ensuring the stability of the system, then, it attempts to force it to track the guidance commands. This paper provides a straightforward method using evolutionary optimisation algorithms to design an appropriate autopilot for non-minimum phase missiles. In order to bring the results to the actual conditions, the missile non-minimum phase model and actuator dynamics with time delay is considered. Proper indices such as system speed, overshoot, undershoot, steady state error and control signal effort have been incorporated to propose an innovative cost function. Then, several applicable meta-heuristic techniques are employed to optimise this cost function. Genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimisation, artificial bee colony, imperialist competitive algorithm and cuckoo search techniques have been compared in this optimisation problem. Simulation results on two benchmark problem show that this method has acceptable speed and it can be used in gain scheduling control design method for non-minimum phase systems. This method can be a suitable replacement for the time consuming procedure of gain tuning in gain scheduling method. The superior advantage of this method compared to the other methods is automatic tuning of the autopilot gains.

Keywords: autopilot design; evolutionary algorithms; non-minimum phase missiles; controller design; optimal acceleration; flight control; actuator dynamics; time delay; gain tuning; system speed; overshoot; undershoot; steady state error; control signal effort; metaheuristics; cost function; genetic algorithms; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; artificial bee colony; ABC; imperialist competitive algorithm; cuckoo search; simulation; gain scheduling control; missile control; missile autopilot.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2016.078664

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2016 Vol.8 No.4, pp.221 - 227

Accepted: 30 May 2016
Published online: 30 Aug 2016 *

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