Simplified longitudinal control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with hybrid actuators

Abstract

This paper considers the longitudinal compound control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles configured with hybrid aerodynamic control surface (ACS) and reaction control system (RCS). In the altitude loop, the proposed nonadaptive back-stepping design results in a simplified ACS-RCS compound control. This is attributable to the introduced tangent tracking errors and ACS-RCS fusion algorithm. ACS nonlinearity, RCS quantization, and modeling parametric uncertainties are handled. In the velocity loop, the performance guaranteed adaptive control is enhanced with the bound estimation mechanism, which accommodates modeling parametric uncertainties with a low dynamic order. The effectiveness of the proposed control is verified via simulations.