Ares-I Bending Filter Design using a Constrained Optimization Approach

The Ares-I launch vehicle represents a challenging flex-body structural environment for control system design. Software filtering of the inertial sensor output is required to ensure adequate stable response to guidance commands while minimizing trajectory deviations. This paper presents a design methodology employing numerical optimization to develop the Ares-I bending filters. The design objectives include attitude tracking accuracy and robust stability with respect to rigid body dynamics, propellant slosh, and flex. Under the assumption that the Ares-I time-varying dynamics and control system can be frozen over a short period of time, the bending filters are designed to stabilize all the selected frozen-time launch control systems in the presence of parameter uncertainty. To ensure adequate response to guidance command, step response specifications are introduced as constraints in the optimization problem. Imposing these constrains minimizes performance degradation caused by the addition of the bending filters. The first stage bending filter design achieves stability by adding lag to the first structural frequency to phase stabilize the first flex mode while gain stabilizing the higher modes. The upper stage bending filter design gain stabilizes all the flex bending modes. The bending filter designs provided here have been demonstrated to provide stable first and second stage control systems in both Draper Ares Stability Analysis Tool (ASAT) and the MSFC MAVERIC 6DOF nonlinear time domain simulation.