Tracking control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with non-affine dynamics via improved neural back-stepping design

Xiangwei Bu; Guangjun He; Ke Wang

doi:10.1016/j.isatra.2018.02.010

Tracking control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with non-affine dynamics via improved neural back-stepping design

ISA Trans. 2018 Apr:75:88-100. doi: 10.1016/j.isatra.2018.02.010. Epub 2018 Feb 17.

Authors

Xiangwei Bu¹, Guangjun He², Ke Wang²

Affiliations

¹ Air and Missile Defense College, Air Force Engineering University, Xi'an 710051, China. Electronic address: buxiangwei1987@126.com.
² Air and Missile Defense College, Air Force Engineering University, Xi'an 710051, China.

PMID: 29458972
DOI: 10.1016/j.isatra.2018.02.010

Abstract

This study considers the design of a new back-stepping control approach for air-breathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV) non-affine models via neural approximation. The AHV's non-affine dynamics is decomposed into velocity subsystem and altitude subsystem to be controlled separately, and robust adaptive tracking control laws are developed using improved back-stepping designs. Neural networks are applied to estimate the unknown non-affine dynamics, which guarantees the addressed controllers with satisfactory robustness against uncertainties. In comparison with the existing control methodologies, the special contributions are that the non-affine issue is handled by constructing two low-pass filters based on model transformations, and virtual controllers are treated as intermediate variables such that they aren't needed for back-stepping designs any more. Lyapunov techniques are employed to show the uniformly ultimately boundedness of all closed-loop signals. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the tracking performance and superiorities of the investigated control strategy.

Keywords: Air-breathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV); Improved back-stepping; Neural approximation; Non-affine dynamics.