Robust Adaptive Control Laws for a Winged Re-entry Vehicle

Abstract

The flight control system for reusable launch vehicles has to work for an extensive flight envelope ranging from hypersonic to subsonic Mach numbers. Since the plant dynamics are highly nonlinear, time-varying, and coupled, classical controllers are designed for large stability margins about the linearised points. This limits the performance of the classical controller, and the design process is iterative and time-consuming. Hence adaptive controllers are designed to handle such complex systems using a standard quadratic Lyapunov function. The existing parameter update laws of the model reference adaptive control system are not robust to bounded disturbances and unmodelled dynamics. Hence this paper proposes modified controller parameter update laws using a rectangular projection operator and barrier Lyapunov function, ensuring robustness to structured and unstructured uncertainties. The rectangular projection-based control law provides that the controller parameters remain within the specified upper and lower limits, whereas the barrier Lyapunov-based controller maintains the trajectory also within the specified error limit. The effectiveness of the proposed update laws is demonstrated for the automatic landing phase of a reusable launch vehicle.