Control of a time-varying hypersonic vehicle model subject to inlet un-start condition

A performance-guaranteed fault-tolerant controller is proposed for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs) with synthetical consideration on time-varying uncertain parameters and inlet un-start condition. Different from most of the existing strategies for AHVs, the possible time-varying uncertain parameters in the control-oriented model are accommodated, which makes the resulting controller more adaptable to a real flight. Moreover, the velocity-dependent constraint on angle-of-attack, which is an important factor keeping the scramjet away from inlet un-start, is taken into account. With the utilization of barrier functions in adaptive design, velocity and altitude tracking errors are bounded by specific performance functions. Relevant analysis shows that the tracking performance can be further improved by proper adjustments on design parameters. The effectiveness of our proposed controller is evaluated through a simulation study.