A continuous nonlinear robust control design for hypersonic vehicles

In this paper, a continuous nonlinear robust control design was proposed for the longitudinal dynamics of a generic hypersonic vehicle developed at NASA Langley Research Center which may be subjected to unknown external disturbance and contains structure uncertainties. Regulation and tracking control design were proposed with the throttle setting and elevator deflection as control inputs. Lyapunov based analysis proved that the proposed controller could achieve semi-global asymptotic tracking, while keep all the closed loop signals to be bounded. Numerical simulation results were provided to illustrate that the proposed controllers achieve good performance with good robustness with respect to the system´s uncertainties and external disturbances.