Improved attitude stabilisation system augmented sounding rocket design, integration, verification & launch

A common barrier to maximising the altitude of a sounding rocket is the attitude deviation from the vertical flight induced by wind, known as weather cocking. An active stabilisation with canards, which was first proposed and implemented in the previous academic year (2022-23), is significantly improved as follows: a compact flight computer, a robust canard mechanical system, the linear quadratic regulator gain tuned and a new telemetry with extended data monitoring/analysis. The verification process, which includes the flight mode detection, the wind tunnel experiment, the telemetry test and the attitude estimation test, has been performed. A successful launch in April 2024 shows the effectiveness of the integrated attitude control system and the ground data supporting system. Copyright (C) 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)