Realization of trajectory precise tracking for hypersonic flight vehicles with prescribed performances

Abstract

This work attempts to achieve precise tracking control for the longitudinal dynamics of hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs) without adopting universal approximators (e.g., fuzzy logic systems, neural networks, etc.). To this purpose, the system nonlinearities are well constrained to be bounded within some compact sets and are tackled by means of adaptation technique. Apart from achieving precise tracking, some prescribed performances (e.g., convergence rate, maximum steady tracking error, etc.) of the tracking errors of velocity, altitude, flight path angle, angle of attack, and pitch rate are also preserved. The proposed method is complexity-reduced and structurally simple in the sense that the time derivatives of the virtual control laws are no longer required and that the number of adaptation parameters have been reduced to only five due to the absence of universal approximators. Barbalat lemma is combined with Lyapunov theory to prove the closed-loop stability, while guaranteeing that the tracking errors eventually converge to zero through choosing appropriate design parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by comparative numerical simulations.