Constrained Predictive Control Of A Servo-Driven Tracking Turret

Vehicle-mounted 2-axis turrets are widely used in high bandwidth tracking systems, frequently encountered in air-to-ground, ground-to-air and air-to-air targeting. Existing controllers for these systems are generally implemented in classical proportional-integral-derivative (PID) form. The objective of this paper is to examine the novel application of constrained model predictive control (MPC) to a Selex turret simulation. The characteristics of the control problem are well matched to MPC, as hard saturation constraints are present in the electrical subsystem and a reference trajectory can be generated for several seconds in advance due to the predictability of a missile trajectory. The state-space model and Kalman filter are described, and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the validity and superior performance of the MPC method. 