Phase plane design based fast altitude tracking control for hypersonic flight vehicle with angle of attack constraint

In this paper, fast setpoint altitude tracking control for Hypersonic Flight Vehicle (HFV) satisfying Angle of Attack (AOA) constraint is studied with a two-loop structure controller, in the presence of parameter uncertainties and disturbances. For the outer loop, phase plane design is adopted for the simplified model under Bang-Bang controller to generate AOA command guaranteeing fast tracking performance. Modifications based on Feedback-Linearization (FL) technique are adopted to transform the phase trajectory into a sliding curve. Moreover, to resist mismatch between design model and actual model, Fast Exponential Reaching Law (FERL) is augmented with the baseline controller to maintain state on the sliding curve. The inner-loop controller is based on backstepping technique to track the AOA command generated by outer-loop controller. Barrier Lyapunov Function (BLF) design is employed to satisfy AOA requirement. Moreover, a novel auxiliary state is introduced to remove the restriction of BLF design on initial tracking errors. Dynamic Surface Control (DSC) is utilized to ease the computation burden. Rigorous stability proof is then given, and AOA is guaranteed to stay in predefined region theoretically. Simulations are conducted to verify the efficiency and superior performance of the proposed method.