Composite predictive flight control for airbreathing hypersonic vehicles

AbstractThe robust optimised tracking control problem for a generic airbreathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV) subject to nonvanishing mismatched disturbances/uncertainties is investigated in this paper. A baseline nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) method is firstly introduced for optimised tracking control of the nominal dynamics. A nonlinear-disturbance-observer-based control law is then developed for robustness enhancement in the presence of both external disturbances and uncertainties. Compared with the existing robust tracking control methods for AHVs, the proposed composite nonlinear MPC method obtains not only promising robustness and disturbance rejection performance but also optimised nominal tracking control performance. The merits of the proposed method are validated by implementing simulation studies on the AHV system.Keywords: airbreathing hypersonic vehiclenonlinear model predictive controloptimised trackingmismatched disturbance rejectionnominal performance recovery Additional informationFundingThis work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61203011]; PhD Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 20120092120031]; Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [grant number BK20130018], [grant number BK2012327]; China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2013M540406]; Postdoctoral Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [grant number 1301006B]; a research grant from the Australian Research Council.