Robust velocity and height control for uncertain hypersonic vehicles

This paper presents a robust controller design approach for the longitudinal dynamics of hypersonic vehicles. The proposed linear and time-invariant controller includes a state feedback H_∞ controller and a robust compensator. The robust compensator is introduced to restrain the effects of nonlinear dynamics and unstructured uncertainties in the whole frequency range. It is proven that the velocity and height tracking errors can be guaranteed to converge to the neighborhood of the origin in a finite time. Simulation results are given to show the advantages of the proposed control method.