Design of a robust control law for the Vega launcher ballistic phase

Abstract: This work presents the design of a robust control law, and the related control system architecture, for the Vega launcher ballistic phase, taking into account the complete six degrees of freedom dynamics. To gain robustness a non-linear control approach has been preferred: more specifically the Lyapunov''s second stability theorem has been exploited, being a very powerful tool to guarantee asymptotic stability of the controlled dynamics. The dynamics of Vega''s actuators has also been taken into account. The system performance has been checked and analyzed by numerical simulations run on real mission data for different operational and configuration scenarios, and the effectiveness of the synthesized control highlighted: in particular scenarios including a wide range of composite''s inertial configurations performing various typologies of maneuvers have been run. The robustness of the controlled dynamics has been validated by 100 cases Monte Carlo analysis campaign: the containment of the dispersion for the controlled variables – say the composite roll, yaw and pitch angles – confirmed the wide validity and generality of the proposed control law. This paper will show the theoretical approach and discuss the obtained results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]