Polytopic LPV gain-scheduled control for a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle

This article investigates polytopic Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) modeling and control problem for a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle. In our method, velocity and altitude are selected as scheduling parameters due to the fact that they are easy to measure, the polytopic LPV model of a flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle can be obtained by using Jacobian linearization and Tensor-Product (TP) model transformation approach. In order to check if the obtained LPV model is suitable for model-based control, an open-system simulation example is verified and the results illustrate that the LPV model which presented in this paper captures the local nonlinearities of the original nonlinear system. Then, an LPV gain-scheduled control method is presented for the developed polytopic LPV model, a convex optimisation problem with Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) constraints is formulated for designing velocity and altitude tracking controller. Numerical simulations have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.