Ascent adaptive energy management method for solid rocket‐powered hypersonic vehicle under uncertainties

Abstract

SummaryThe solid rocket booster is widely used in the launch mission for hypersonic vehicles nowadays, whose ascent energy management is still a challenging problem due to the inherent dynamic nonlinearity. This paper casts the problem into an equivalent ascent guidance one and proposes a model predictive static programming (MPSP) based solution. The MPSP‐based method is a computationally efficient solver that adapts to different energy demands while guaranteeing the satisfaction of terminal constraints. To further improve the performance of MPSP in this problem, a Bézier spline guidance method is proposed to generate high‐quality reference trajectories such that the MPSP can converge with high accuracy while satisfying the real‐time requirement. Additionally, an online parameter estimation based on the extended Kalman filter is employed to avoid large terminal state deviations incurred by parametric uncertainties during the Bézier curve computation and linearization in MPSP. Numerical simulations with different hard terminal constraints and uncertainties are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can guide the hypersonic vehicle to a given terminal state under uncertainties and outperforms several existing ascent energy management methods.