Distributed-Observer-Based on Longitudinal Flight Control for Hypersonic Vehicle

An output feedback control is investigated to achieve stable tracking of velocity and altitude in hypersonic flight vehicle in the paper. A distributed observer is proposed to estimate the unmeasurable flight path angel and angle of attack through a strongly connected directed network topology. Then, a nonlinear control is addressed on the longitudinal dynamics of a rigid hypersonic flight vehicle (HFV) with partial measurable states and the estimated states. The system dynamic is divided into the altitude subsystem and the velocity subsystem. In the altitude subsystem, the backstepping design is proposed for constructing the controllers utilizing the estimated states. The nonlinear dynamic inversion controller is introduced to accomplish the velocity tracking. Finally, numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in providing favorable tracking performance and exact state estimation ability.