Pitch Control of a Rocket with a Novel LQG/LTR Control Algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents the design, simulation and analysis of a novel LQG and LQG/LTR control algorithm for the pitch angle of a sounding rocket. These improved LQG and LQG/LTR control algorithms stem from the fact that a Riccati Differential Equation (RDE) rather than the popular Algebraic Riccati Equation (ARE) is used to obtaining the Kalman gain in the observer of the traditional Linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control algorithm. Thus, eight (8) different controllers were design, simulated and analysed, three (3) of such controllers are novel and two out of these novel controllers were able to recover completely the robustness lost in the traditional LQG controller. All controllers synthesized were analysed using time response characteristics of closed-loop system and compared with the LQR and LQG control system. Using the LQR controller as the benchmark for best performance and the LQG as the worst. This study shows an application option that demonstrates optimal control system design in MATLAB/Simulink® and the approach put forward here proves to be very effective.