An overview on flight dynamics and control approaches for hypersonic vehicles

With the capability of high speed flying, a more reliable and cost efficient way to access space is provided by hypersonic flight vehicles. Controller design, as key technology to make hypersonic flight feasible and efficient, has numerous challenges stemming from large flight envelope with extreme range of operation conditions, strong interactions between elastic airframe, the propulsion system and the structural dynamics.This paper briefly presents several commonly studied hypersonic flight dynamics such as winged-cone model,truth model, curve-fitted model, control oriented model and re-entry motion. In view of different schemes such as linearizing at the trim state, input-output linearization, characteristic modeling, and back-stepping, the recent research on hypersonic flight control is reviewed and the comparison is presented. To show the challenges for hypersonic flight control, some specific characteristics of hypersonic flight are discussed and the potential future research is addressed with dealing with actuator dynamics, aerodynamic/reaction-jet control, flexible effects,non-minimum phase problem and dynamics interaction.