Incremental Sliding Mode Control for Aeroelastic Launch Vehicles with Propellant Slosh

This paper focuses on the attitude control and propellant slosh suppression of aeroelastic launch vehicles. Four candidate controllers are proposed: the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), the Incremental Non-linear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) control, the Incremental Sliding Mode Control (INDI-SMC), and the Feedback Linearisation-based Sliding Mode Control (FL-SMC). Theoretical analyses show INDI itself is unable to deal with under-actuated systems. Therefore, when applied to the launch vehicle directly, it cannot simultaneously track the pitch command and effectively suppress the slosh dynamics. This issue is solved by INDI-SMC, which also has enhanced robustness against both matched and unmatched uncertainties. Furthermore, despite its reduced model dependency, INDI-SMC has better robustness against model uncertainties and external disturbances than FL-SMC. These merits of INDI-SMC are verified by various simulation results. First, when the nominal plant configuration is adopted, the system using INDI-SMC has the smallest pitch-angle tracking error. The slosh motion is also effectively damped out. Second, Monte-Carlo studies are used to test the robustness of LQR, INDI-SMC, and FL-SMC to parametric uncertainties. Among these three controllers, LQR shows the worst performance and largest control-effort outliers. On the contrary, both INDI-SMC and FL-SMC can resist a wider range of perturbations without significant performance degradation. Even so, the tracking and slosh damping performance of INDI-SMC is still the best. Finally, both INDI-SMC and FL-SMC show robustness against unmodeled dynamics, while the robust performance of INDI-SMC is superior.