PID Tracking Controller for Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicle

This paper proposes a tuned PID tracking controller for the linearized model of an Air-breathing Hypersonic Vehicle(AHV). The control intention is to track angle of attack, velocity, flight path angle and the pitch rate of the AHV. The inherent coupling between the propulsion system, the dynamics of the airframe as well as the presence of vehement flexibility effects are the main challenges for control design in this category of vehicles. This paper proposes a tuned PID controller for tracking the linearized model of AHV. The proposed approach takes the advantages of small perturbation analysis method to simplify the strong couplings and hence linearize the system. The gain values of PID controller is optimized using Practical Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. The performance of the proposed controller is examined using simulation and the results demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves excellent tracking performance.