Composite predictive flight control for airbreathing hypersonic vehicles

The robust optimised tracking control problem for a generic airbreathing hypersonic vehicle (AHV) subject to nonvanishing mismatched disturbances/ uncertainties is investigated in this paper. A baseline nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) method is firstly introduced for optimised tracking control of the nominal dynamics. A nonlinear-disturbance-observer-based control law is then developed for robustness enhancement in the presence of both external disturbances and uncertainties. Compared with the existing robust tracking control methods for AHVs, the proposed composite nonlinear MPC method obtains not only promising robustness and disturbance rejection performance but also optimised nominal tracking control performance. The merits of the proposed method are validated by implementing simulation studies on the AHV system.