Integrated design and control of hypersonic vehicles

In this paper we consider the design and control of an airbreathing hypersonic vehicle. Such vehicles are characterized by non-minimum phase characteristics, instability, actuator saturation constraints, and lightly damped flexible modes. While traditional vehicle design has followed an iterative sequential procedure (with the controller design following an aero-centric vehicle design phase), an integrated vehicle-control design process (based on bilinear matrix inequalities) is considered in this paper. We consider several example problems to illustrate the advantages of such an approach.