Adaptive integral dynamic surface control of a hypersonic flight vehicle

In this article, non-linear adaptive dynamic surface air speed and flight path angle control designs are presented for the longitudinal dynamics of a flexible hypersonic flight vehicle. The tracking performance of the control design is enhanced by introducing a novel integral term that caters to avoiding a large initial control signal. To ensure feasibility, the design scheme incorporates magnitude and rate constraints on the actuator commands. The uncertain non-linear functions are approximated by an efficient use of the neural networks to reduce the computational load. A detailed stability analysis shows that all closed-loop signals are uniformly ultimately bounded and the L∞$\mathcal {L}_{\infty }$ tracking performance is guaranteed. The robustness of the design scheme is verified through numerical simulations of the flexible flight vehicle model.