Adaptive nonlinear control of missiles using neural networks

Research has shown that neural networks can be used to improve upon approximate dynamic inversion for control of uncertain nonlinear systems. In one architecture, the neural network adaptively cancels inversion errors through on-line learning. Such learning is accomplished by a simple weight update rule derived from Lyapunov theory, thus assuring stability of the closed-loop system. In this research, previous results using linear-in-parameters neural networks were reformulated in the context of a more general class of composite nonlinear systems, and the control scheme was shown to possess important similarities and major differences with established methods of adaptive control. The neural-adaptive nonlinear control methodology in question has been used to design an autopilot for an anti-air missile with enhanced agile maneuvering capability, and simulation results indicate that this approach is a feasible one. There are, however, certain difficulties associated with choosing the proper network architecture which make it difficult to achieve the rapid learning required in this application.; Accordingly, this technique has been further extended to incorporate the important class of feedforward neural networks with a single hidden layer. These neural networks feature well-known approximation capabilities and provide an effective, although nonlinear, parameterization of the adaptive control problem. Numerical results from a six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear agile anti-air missile simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of the autopilot design based on multilayer networks.; Previous work in this area has implicitly assumed precise knowledge of the plant order, and made no allowances for unmodeled dynamics. This thesis describes an approach to the problem of controlling a class of nonlinear systems in the face of both unknown nonlinearities and unmodeled dynamics. The proposed methodology is similar to robust adaptive control techniques derived for control of linear systems, providing a simple and intuitive modification to enhance robustness. The central idea of this robustified control design is the introduction of additional controller dynamics which provide a degree of robustness to unmodeled dynamics. To illustrate the theoretical development, a longitudinal autopilot is designed for a simplified nonlinear short-period missile model with input unmodeled dynamics. Simulation results demonstrate dramatically improved robustness in the face of this type of uncertainty.