Design of flight control system for a Hypersonic Gliding Vehicle based on nonlinear disturbance observer

Hypersonic Gliding Vehicle (HGV) is a new class of hypersonic glider being developed. This paper designs a flight control system for a Hypersonic Gliding Vehicle based on nonlinear disturbance observers. Firstly, a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is used to estimate the unknown disturbances; the influence of disturbances is estimated by the NDO. Secondly, the NDO is integrated with a conventional sliding mode controller to compensate the influence of disturbances based on the estimate. Stability of the composite closed-loop system is provided using Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulation results present that the flight control system for the HGV achieves excellent results.