Adaptive fault-tolerant control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles robust to input nonlinearities

ABSTRACT

This paper designs a fault-tolerant adaptive controller for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs) subject to modelling parameter uncertainties, external disturbances, and actuator nonlinearities of saturation and backlash. The proposed adaptive control scheme is able to compensate the effects of actuator saturation by utilising the states of five auxiliary dynamic systems, which are driven by the differences between the nominal and saturated input signals. Additionally, the effects of control surfaces on the aerodynamic force and moment, which are commonly neglected by the existing adaptive control designs, can be well handled. Transient tracking performance is explicitly derived in terms of ${\mathcal{L}}_2$ norms of the tracking errors. The final control scheme is obtained in a direct form, which makes its implementation more practical compared with other adaptive controllers for AHVs. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by numerical simulations.

KEYWORDS:

• Air-breathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV)
• adaptive fault-tolerant control
• parametric uncertainty
• input saturation
• backlash nonlinearity

Acknowledgments

The author Hao An gratefully thanks Dr. Halit Zengin from University of Waterloo and Dr. Qianqian Wu from Harbin Institute of Technology for proofreading this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61525303], [grant number 61503099], [grant number 61640301]; Top-Notch Young Talents Program of China (Ligang Wu); China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project [grant number 2015M570293], [grant number 2016T90291]; Postdoctoral Innovation Talent Support Plan of China [grant number BX201700064]; Self-Planned Task of State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System (HIT) [grant number SKLRS201713A].