Robust tracking control design for a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle

A nonlinear robust controller was presented to improve the tracking control performance of a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV) which is subjected to system parametric uncertainties and unknown additive time-varying disturbances. The longitudinal dynamic model for the flexible AHV was used for the control development. High-gain observers were designed to compensate for the system uncertainties and additive disturbances. Small gain theorem and Lyapunov based stability analysis were utilized to prove the stability of the closed loop system. Locally uniformly ultimately bounded tracking of the vehicle’s velocity, altitude and attack angle were achieved under aeroelastic effects, system parametric uncertainties and unknown additive disturbances. Matlab/Simulink simulation results were provided to validate the robustness of the proposed control design. The simulation results demonstrate that the tracking errors stay in a small region around zero.