Optimal acceleration autopilot design for non-minimum phase missiles using evolutionary algorithms

The flight control system is a key element to achieve required performance in missiles and aircrafts. First purpose of flight control system is to ensuring the stability of the system, then, it attempts to force it to track the guidance commands. This paper provides a straightforward method using evolutionary optimisation algorithms to design an appropriate autopilot for non-minimum phase missiles. In order to bring the results to the actual conditions, the missile non-minimum phase model and actuator dynamics with time delay is considered. Proper indices such as system speed, overshoot, undershoot, steady state error and control signal effort have been incorporated to propose an innovative cost function. Then, several applicable meta-heuristic techniques are employed to optimise this cost function. Genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimisation, artificial bee colony, imperialist competitive algorithm and cuckoo search techniques have been compared in this optimisation problem. Simulation results on two benchmark problem show that this method has acceptable speed and it can be used in gain scheduling control design method for non-minimum phase systems. This method can be a suitable replacement for the time consuming procedure of gain tuning in gain scheduling method. The superior advantage of this method compared to the other methods is automatic tuning of the autopilot gains.