Nonlinear Disturbance-Observer-Based Sliding Mode Control for Flexible Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicles

This paper investigates a tracking problem for flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (FAHVs) with composite disturbance. The composite disturbance produced by flexible effects, parameter uncertainties, and external interferences is modeled as a kind of unknown derivative-bounded disturbance in this paper. Then a novel composite control strategy is presented for the nonlinear FAHV model with the composite disturbance, which combines a nonlinear disturbance-observer-based compensator (NDOBC) and a dynamic-inversion-based sliding mode controller (DIBSMC). Specifically, the NDOBC is constructed to estimate and compensate for the composite disturbance, and the DIBSMC is designed to track desired trajectories of velocity and flight path angle. Moreover, the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the composite system can be guaranteed by using Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulation results on a full nonlinear model of FAHVs demonstrate that the proposed nonlinear disturbance-observer-based sliding mode controller is more effective than the traditional DIBSMC. Specifically, it is shown that the chattering of traditional DIBSMC in presence of composite disturbances can be attenuated with the NDOBC.