LAUSR

Abstract Despite the exciting improvement in air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs), most of the developed control strategies are only for cruise flight. This paper considers the longitudinal maneuver flight of AHVs, whose main purpose is to propose a low-dimension full-envelope adaptive control. In contrast to the existing adaptive back-stepping designs for AHVs, the proposed control synthetically handles the time-varying uncertain coefficients of aerodynamic force and moment that are inevitable during a full-envelope hypersonic flight, while accommodating actuator faults and flexible dynamics as well as circumventing over-parametrization and “explosion of complexity”. The above superiorities are attributed to the combination of the bound estimate mechanism and the sliding mode differentiator in a dynamic surface control scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed control is verified by a simulation study.