Robust flight control law design for an automatic landing flight experiment

The Automatic Landing FLight EXperiment, ALFLEX, was conducted by the National Aerospace Laboratory and National Space Development Agency of Japan, in order to develop their automatic landing technology for future unmanned reentry space vehicle. All the flight experiments were successfully completed. Because the ALFLEX vehicle is an unmanned and autonomous vehicle which has tip-fin wings, the flight control law has to achieve high-response-performance and robustness simultaneously. In this paper, the design method used to achieve these objectives is presented, as well as the results of flight experiments related to performance and robustness.