Autopilot Design for Flexible Tactical Aerospace Vehicle Using Parameter Plane Technique

This paper describes an application of parameter plane technique for autopilot design of flexible tactical aerospace vehicle (TAV). In literature, it is shown that parameter plane analysis simplifies the autopilot design for TAV considering rigid body dynamics only. However in the recent era, most of the TAV's are structurally flexible in nature because of high l/d ratio. This is practiced for minimizing radar cross section (RCS) to avoid detection. The flexible nature of TAV causes structural oscillations which can be stabilized using compensators. The significant contribution of this paper is development of generalized algorithm for parameter plane technique. This algorithm can be used for both rigid as well as flexible body dynamics which was not available in literature. Stabilizing techniques such as gain stabilization and phase stabilization with any compensator dynamics can be used without modifying the algorithm. Distinct region of control gains is obtained for desired stability margins using this generalized parameter plane algorithm for three loop latax autopilot with flexible body dynamics and different stabilization techniques.