Control of a Hypersonic Vehicle with Actuation Bounds and Scramjet Engine Constraints

Air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs) have the potential to revolutionize space access and high-speed global transportation. These vehicles can cruise at Mach 5 and above, making them highly attractive for many time-critical applications. Furthermore, by using atmospheric oxygen, they eliminate the need to carry oxidizers. Consequently, AHVs offer increased payload capacities, reusability, and reduced construction and operational costs.
This work addresses the tracking control problem for a generic AHV subject to realistic state-dependent constraints imposed by its propulsion system. Typical AHV designs have highly unstable dynamics, strong aeropropulsive couplings, and significant uncertainties. These intricate dynamics are captured by the Technion’s Scramjet-powered Air Breathing Aerospace Research model of a Hypersonic Vehicle (TSABAR-HV), which is used as a physical baseline. From a control perspective, these characteristics and constraints pose considerable challenges that must be addressed to develop a functional AHV.
The controller is designed for a mathematically tractable control-oriented model which is derived from the detailed TSABAR-HV truth model. Tracking performance is guaranteed through a control Lyapunov function (CLF). Within this framework, a control input for tracking is computed by solving a quadratic program (QP) that enforces the CLF condition. This yields an optimal, nominal pointwise min-norm (PMN) controller. To ensure that the system does not violate its constraints, this nominal input is minimally augmented via another PMN solution derived from a high-order barrier Lyapunov function (BLF). The CLF and BLF are made robust to uncertainties by assuming that they can be bounded. This bound is used to formulate conservative requirements of the CLF and BLF. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed controller successfully tracks reference signals while strictly adhering to state constraints.

This work is towards an M.Sc. degree under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Moshe Idan, The Stephen B. Klein Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Technion.