Modelling, simulation and target tracking control of two degree of freedom (2 DOF) gun turret system

Weapon system is one of the most important components in an armored vehicle that plays a major role especially during enemy attacking missions. One of the important issues associated with a weapon system during firing is the system’s inability to fire accurately towards an intended target due to the difficulty in controlling the elevation and platform angle in the gun system. The aim of this study is to develop an automatic target tracking system for a gun turret system. Therefore, a two degree-of-freedom gun turret simulator is developed which consists of the azimuth and elevation rotational motion. The automatic gun turret system is operated by a combination of software and hardware devices. A gun turret system involving a DC motor actuator is modeled mathematically and simulated within MATLAB/Simulink. The overall tracking system consists of target detection and target tracking elements. First, target detection module is developed using a motion detection method based on image processing technique. A control structure for the target tracking of the gun turret is proposed in this study, consisting of an outer and inner feedback loops. There are two types of controllers considered for the outer loop controller, namely Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) and Sliding Mode Control (SMC) controller, with the latter was found to be a more superior choice. The SMC controller is then further optimized using an optimization algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Each controller strategy is evaluated in terms of its target tracking performance. The PSO-tuned SMC controller is proven to be the most suitable controller for this system due to the better performance results for tracking the target accurately compared to the PID and untuned SMC controllers. In order to validate the control strategy on the actual gun turret simulator, a hardware-inthe-loop (HiL) simulation is carried out. In conclusion, the proposed automatic gun turret system is able to detect and track targets in both static and moving positions which is proven from the experimental results.