Flexibility analysis of a tracking control method for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles

This paper studies the flexibility of a tracking control method originally proposed by the authors for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs). The main feature of this method is to design the tracking controller without canceling but using aero-propulsive, as well as elevator-to-lift couplings. By introducing a virtual input, the tracking controller and external reference trajectories are simultaneously obtained by solving a system of linear algebraic equations. This system of linear algebraic equations is always solvable and the solution space of the corresponding homogeneous system is of dimension 3, which leads to much freedom in choosing or defining the free variables. The flexibility is reflected by the fact that the flight requirements of AHVs are involved in the definition of the free variables. Three case studies on different maneuvers, i.e., flight at constant dynamic pressure, flight at variant dynamic pressure and flight with fast climb rate are considered to verify the flexibility of this method. Simulation results show its effectiveness and flexibility. © 2013 South China University of Technology, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.