A Study of a Gun-Turret Assembly in an Armored Tank using Model Predictive Control

St. Louis, MO: American Control Conference Hyatt Regency Riverfront, 2009, June 10-12.Operation of the gun/turret system in a military tank is limited by several constraints some of which are posed by obstacles existing on the vehicle’s own platform. These mechanical constraints acting as hard constraints can cause serious damage to the whole assembly if violated. A control strategy developed for such a system must avoid possible collision of the gun/turret system with these obstacles. We propose to use a MPC based control strategy, due to its inherent ability to handle constraints, for the deck clearance problem and evaluate its performance under operating conditions for a linear model of the tank. Matlab based MPCtoolbox is used to set up the MPC calculations for the gun/turret system. Simulations are performed to investigate and compare the performance of the controller under various deck constraint limits. It is shown that MPC is effective in addressing both the stabilization and deck clearance objectives.