A new tracking control approach of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles cruise

This paper focuses on the tracking problem for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs) and proposes a new control method on the basis of not canceling, but using, aero-propulsive, as well as elevator-to-lift, couplings to design controllers without strategically avoiding or reducing the nonminimum phase characteristic. The controllers and the external reference trajectories are simultaneously obtained by solving a system of linear algebraic equations. The altitude error is shown to be asymptotically stable. The velocity, flight path angle, angle-of-attack and pitch rate errors all exponentially converge to zero with the proposed tracking controllers. Simulation results show that the control strategy proposed in this paper provides better tracking performance for AHVs.