Velocity-based Gain-scheduled Lateral Auto-pilot for an Agile Missile

This paper investigates the application of velocity-based gain-scheduling techniques to a demanding, highly nonlinear, missile control design task. Scheduling on instantaneous incidence (a rapidly varying quantity) is well known to lead to considerable difficulties with conventional gain-scheduling methods. Moreover, the missile dynamics do not have well-defined relative degree at operating points where the lateral velocity is zero and thus conventional feedback linearisation methods cannot be applied to design a controller.