High-Precision, Robust Nonlinear and Intelligent Control for Advanced Weapon Pointing Systems

Future combat armored vehicles, air-defense artillery, and attack heliopters are required to perform precise pointing in the presence of unpredictable terrain motions, unmodeled flexible dynamics, unmeasurable disturbances, and nonlinear/time-varying effects. To meet this challenge, a control scheme integrating nonlinear control, linear robust control and disturbance estimation/compensation will be conducted for high precision, rapid and robust weapon tracking/pointing systems. The phase I project will focus on the investigation and applicaitons of robust, adaptive and nonlinear control technology to smart weapon tracking systems. The inversion-based nonlinear control apporaches, including feedback linearizatio, sliding mode control and adaptive control, the nonlinear H-infinity control and the nonlinear servo-control will be emphasized and conducted. The real-time implementation and applications to the Extended Range Gunnery (ERG) fire control system and the gun turret testbed (ATB1000) will also be conducted and demonstrated. The objective is to design a high performance weapon tracking/pointing control system with rapid and precise pointing capability, robustness against unmodeled modes and parameter uncertainties, and disturbance rejecion against base motion and firing disturbances. The development of the weapon control system design will significantly improve the precision, response, performance, and robustness of future weapon systems. The development will spin off to many other military and commercial applications such as hydraulic and electric motor manufacturers, machine tool manufacturers, process control companies, automobile and aircraft companies robotic applications, stabilized optical sight systems, etc.