Gain-scheduled autopilots have emerged as a dominant strategy to achieve adaptive control of coupled, non-linear engineering complexities, owing to an ability to adapt to changing operational conditions and uncertainties. This study focuses on utilizing bilinear interpolation of gain-scheduled autopilots, emphasizing enhanced system performance and robustness. Through a comprehensive investigation and comparative analysis using three disparate cases, advantages over conventional methods are revealed. Strengths and weaknesses of both simple and specialized variants (such as linear, and real-time gain-scheduling) are introduced. Three missile guidance case-studies utilize simulation time and miss distance figures of merit. Comparing the performance of bilinear interpolation and automatic instantiations to index-search, over comparable traveled distances, missile miss distances were improved 179% and 196% respectively with slightly improved computational burden.
Keywords: bilinear interpolation; control and guidance; control gains; gain-scheduled autopilots; nonlinear control; three-dimensional lookup table (3D-LUT).