A Nonlinear Adaptive Reconfigurable Controller for a Generic 6-DOF Hypersonic Vehicle Model

The development of a nonlinear adaptive controller with reconfiguration capabilities for a generic 6-DOF model of an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle is considered in this paper. The proposed controller is endowed with a modular structure (comprised of an inner-loop adaptive attitude controller, a robust nonlinear outer-loop controller and a dynamic control allocation scheme) that avoids the complexity typical of solutions based on adaptive back-stepping. An observer-based algorithm achieves decoupling between adaptation and constrained actuator dynamics. A case study is presented to illustrate the capability of the proposed methodology to deal with the simultaneous occurrence of significant model uncertainty and actuator faults.