Robustness analysis of a reusable launch vehicle flight control law

This paper describes a novel optimisation-based framework for analysing the robustness of advanced flight control laws for reusable launch vehicles. The proposed analysis methods are applied and tested on an industrial-standard simulation model of a reusable launch vehicle equipped with a full authority nonlinear dynamic inversion-based flight control law. The reliability, computational complexity and efficiency of the framework are evaluated against standard industrial approaches based on Monte Carlo simulation. The results of the study show that the proposed approach has the potential to significantly improve both the reliability and efficiency of the flight clearance process for future reusable launch vehicles.