Practical Solution to Efficient Flight Path Control for Hypersonic Vehicles

Abstract

There is a severe lag between the pitch attitude and flight path angle of hypersonic vehicles, imposing extraordinary difficulty in achieving high-precision trajectory control. A comprehensive flight path regulation scheme is proposed to resolve this problem. The inherent relationship between the pitch attitude and flight path angle is sufficiently used to establish a feed-forward control framework where the flight path reference is directly fed into the attitude loop in order to quickly obtain the major control component. To achieve efficient tracking, an attitude control method based on active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed. The new attitude control method utilizes an extended state observer (ESO) to estimate the unknown model dynamics and external disturbances. The remaining part of control is generated by ADRC acting on the flight path angle, which plays a complementary role. The stability margin tester is used to tune the attitude controller explicitly. Finally, simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.