Asymptotic tracking control for air breathing hypersonic vehicles via a nonlinear robust adaptive methodology

This paper presents a new continuous nonlinear robust controller for the tracking problem of a class of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles. The vehicle´s longitudinal dynamic model contains unstable zero-dynamics, which brings great challenges for the control development. A nonlinear robust design approach is combined with dynamic parameter estimation to improve control performance under model uncertainties. The flight controller requires very limited knowledge of the system dynamic model, and is free of chattering issue. Lyapunov based analysis are utilized to prove that the proposed control laws achieve asymptotic tracking of the vehicle´s longitudinal velocity and flight path angle (FPA) under system parametric uncertainties, while keeping all the other signals bounded. Numerical simulation results are provided to validate the performance of the proposed algorithms.