Realistic models of engineering systems often are nonlinear. As a consequence, the dynamical behavior of a system to be controlled changes with the operating region. In recent years, one design methodology to control this effect, called Gain Scheduling, has proven to be successful. The basic idea of gain scheduling is to break the control design process into two steps. The first step is to linearize the model about one or more operating points. Then linear design methods are applied to the linearized model at each operating point in order to obtain the stabilized system within the design objectives. The final step, the actual gain scheduling, is obtained by scheduling or interpolating the gains of the local operating points designs in order to handle the nonlinear aspects of the design problem.
In this thesis, a nonlinear controller will be designed using a gain scheduling technique for a hypothetical missile model. The missile considered here is the same as discussed in recent papers on gain scheduling. Here, a nonlinear autopilot is designed using classical servomechanism theory and state feedback/state observer based techniques.