A survey of the hypersonic flight vehicle and its guidance and control technology

Hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs) have strong penetration and reconnaissance capabilities in military affairs, efficient deployment and space travel capabilities in civil use, making them one of the important ways for countries to construct strategic threats and compete for space resources. Hence, it draws much attention from many countries. The paper firstly reviews the development history and current research status of the HFVs, aiming to reveal the development principle. It is followed by the flight task analysis in different space domains ranging from orbiting space, near-space, and airspace. Then, the flight constraints and guidance methods for the reentry phase are mainly discussed, including offline reference trajectory-based guidance method, online trajectory-based guidance method, and prediction guidance method. Furthermore, the expectation of the future guidance system is given which lies in multi-constraints trajectory-based guidance method with high accuracy, nonlinear programming trajectory optimization-based guidance in real-time, and trajectory re-planning guidance technology with robustness to different tasks. Thirdly, the hypersonic flight control methods on solving the problem of high nonlinearity, uncertainty, time-varying, flexibility, input constraint, and system fault are summarized. Then, looking into the future, three aspects are discussed, including the deep mechanism analysis on system model/disturbance/fault, the control tradeoff when solving multiple problems, controller smooth switching technology, and autonomous hypersonic flight control in the present of the unexpected events. At last, the thinking on the HFV future development including hypersonic missile and reusable launch vehicle is provided, as well as the integrated guidance and control system design. © 2019, Editorial Board of Journal of Harbin Institute of Technology. All right reserved.