Coordinated attitude control of hypersonic flight vehicles based on the coupling analysis

Abstract

At hypersonic speed, strong nonlinear couplings will bring enormous challenges to the attitude control of a hypersonic flight vehicle. To reduce the negative impacts of the couplings, a hierarchical coordinated controller is proposed for a generic hypersonic vehicle in this paper. By using a statistical sampling method, a series of coupling analyses between any two different attitude variables groups are studied firstly, and the matrices that describe the coupling degrees are provided. Based on the coupling degree matrices, two coordinated controllers are designed for the attitude angles and angular rates, respectively. The simulation results indicate that the proposed controller can effectively coordinate the coupling impacts, and achieve smooth attitude tracking.