Parametric autopilot design for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle

This paper presents a parametric autopilot design for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle. The coupled, nonlinear dynamics necessitates the use of separate pitch and yaw/roll channels, where the cross channel states are treated as exogenous parameters. Then controllers were designed at fixed points using parametric eigenstructure assignment method and a novel gain-scheduled controller design method based on time-varying criterion is proposed upon. The novel method could easily be translated into an optimal problem, the solved controller can have good control performance. Six-DOF Simulation results for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle show the effectiveness of the method.