This paper studies the flexibility of a tracking control method originally proposed by the authors for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles （AHVs）. The main feature of this method is to design the tracking controller without canceling but using aero-propulsive, as well as elevator-to-lift couplings. By introducing a virtual input, the tracking controller and external reference trajectories are simultaneously obtained by solving a system of linear algebraic equations. This system of linear algebraic equations is always solvable and the solution space of the corresponding homogeneous system is of dimension 3, which leads to much freedom in choosing or defining the free variables. The flexibility is reflected by the fact that the flight requirements of AHVs are involved in the definition of the free variables. Three case studies on different maneuvers, i.e., flight at constant dynamic pressure, flight at variant dynamic pressure and flight with fast climb rate are considered to verify the flexibility of this method. Simulation results show its effectiveness and flexibility.
We investigate the adaptive tracking problem for the longitudinal dynamics of state-constrained airbreathing hypersonic vehicles, where not only the velocity and the altitude, but also the angle of attack(AOA) is required to be tracked. A novel indirect AOA tracking strategy is proposed by viewing the pitch angle as a new output and devising an appropriate pitch angle reference trajectory. Then based on the redefined outputs(i.e., the velocity,the altitude, and the pitch angle), a modified backstepping design is proposed where the barrier Lyapunov function is used to solve the state-constrained control problem and the control gain of this class of systems is unknown.Stability analysis is given to show that the tracking ob jective is achieved, all the closed-loop signals are bounded,and all the states always satisfy the given constraints. Finally, numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
