CEAS EuroGNC 2026
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Automated Mixed-Sensitivity Design Based on Typical Launcher Performance Specifications
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| David Secades |
MSc, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. | | Aitor Gomez |
PhD, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. | | Paulo Rosa |
Head of the Avionics Business Unit, DEIMOS Engenharia SA, Lisbon, Portugal. | | João Belfo |
GNC Engineer, DEIMOS Engenharia SA, GNC Competence Center, Lisbon, Portugal. | | Jakob Stoustrup |
Professor, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. |
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| Abstract:
Applications of H-infinity controller design as presented in the literature often rely significantly on manual tuning and iteration. This paper proposes uncertainty lumping, a novel framework which can increase the automation of the tuning process, simplify the weight design and reduce the conservativeness of the controller synthesis. Uncertainty lumping combines unstructured and parametric uncertainties while preserving their dependency relationships. This enables arbitrary combinations of competing and dependent requirements, along with system uncertainties, to be incorporated into the synthesis process. Furthermore, worst-case stability requirements can now be expressed as weights. To showcase the potential of this framework, the Thrust Vector Control (TVC) of a rigid-body launch vehicle is considered. A gain-scheduled robust controller is designed for the ascent phase. The applicable requirements from the VEGA rocket are translated into simple, well-known weights and lumped together into an equivalent weight that encodes the robust stability condition, as well as the stability requirements for nominal and worst-case conditions. The resulting controller is successfully validated against the ESA-i4GNC non-linear simulator and by frequency analysis, where the lumped weights are employed. The H-infinity norm of the synthesized controller is compared to that of the textbook approach, demonstrating reduced conservativeness.
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| Keywords: Robust control; GNC; uncertainty lumping; H-infinity weight design |
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2026-036 doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-036 |
| David Secades, Aitor Gomez, Paulo Rosa, João Belfo, Jakob Stoustrup: Automated Mixed-Sensitivity Design Based on Typical Launcher Performance Specifications. Proceedings of the 2026 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Madrid, Spain. May 2026. doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-036.
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| BibTeX entry (UTF-8):
@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2026-036,
author = {Secades, David and Gomez, Aitor and Rosa, Paulo and Belfo, João and Stoustrup, Jakob},
title = {Automated Mixed-Sensitivity Design Based on Typical Launcher Performance Specifications},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
address = {Madrid, Spain},
month = may,
year = {2026},
doi = {10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-036}
}
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