Backstepping control for longitudinal dynamics of hypersonic flight vehicle

In this paper, a backstepping control design is presented for the longitudinal dynamics of a hypersonic flight vehicle. The GHV dynamics system is first decoupled into two subsystems, velocity subsystem and altitude subsystem. Then, the two subsystems are transformed into the strict-feedback forms, and on the basis of which the velocity controller and altitude controller are separately designed. Next, a comprehensive Lyapunov function based stability analysis is chosen to show that the tracking errors are semi-global uniformly bounded and the signals of the system are bounded. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed controller provides satisfied control performance.