Acceleration autopilot design for gliding guided projectiles with less measurement information

In this paper, a novel acceleration autopilot is proposed to solve the problem of the design of the flight control system of gliding guided projectiles under the factors such as cross-coupling dynamics, uncertainties, and constraints of the sensors, actuators, and system complexity. Unlike the traditional two/three-loop autopilot, only the measured accelerations are directly adopted as feedback in the proposed autopilot to reduce the cost and the system complexity, and to improve the reliability. The feasible and effective of the proposed autopilot is verified through several case studies. Results indicate that the designed autopilot can achieve quick, accurate, and no-overshoot tracking of the given signals, with good active-disturbance-rejection and decoupling performance and strong robustness and adaptability. The control parameters are easy and systematic to tune, and not sensitive to the perturbations of aerodynamic parameters within a wide range. In addition, the canard deflection commands change slowly from zero at the initial stage, and also yield a smooth and gentle rather than sharp change after each switching of acceleration signals, which can effectively avoid the control saturation and oscillation and enhance the flight stability.