Adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode control design for near space hypersonic vehicles

This paper presents an adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode approach for the attitude control of near space hypersonic vehicles (NSHV) in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. Firstly, a novel nonsingular terminal sliding surface is developed and its finite-time convergence is analyzed. Then, an adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode control law is proposed, which is chattering free. In the proposed approach, all parameter uncertainties and external disturbances are lumped into one term, which is estimated by an adaptive uncertainty estimation for eliminating the boundary requirement needed in the conventional control design. Subsequently, stability of the closed-loop system is proven based on Lyapunov theory. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to the attitude control design for NSHV. Simulation results show that the proposed approach attains a satisfactory performance in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances.