Analytical decoupling control of a generic hypersonic vehicle based on internal model control

This paper presents an analytical decoupling approach to designing a velocity and altitude tracking autopilot for a generic hypersonic vehicle (GHV). Different from other decoupling control methods which need to design a decoupler and a controller, the adopted design method only needs to design one controller to satisfy both set-point tracking and decoupling requirements simultaneously. Besides, the proposed design method has two evident advantages: Firstly, the designed controller is derived systematically by minimizing the defined performance index. The design procedure is simple and the derived controller is given in analytical form. Secondly, the performances of set-point tracking and robustness can be easily tuned by adjusting the performance degrees in the derived controller. It is very convenient for engineers to redesign the controller when the performance specifications are changed. Numerical simulation of GHV proves the effectiveness of the design method.