Adaptive fault-tolerant control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with variable geometry inlet

A novel adaptive fault-tolerant controller is proposed for a switched model of air-breathing hypersonic vehicle with variable geometry inlet (AHV-VGI). The VGI with movable translation fairing is used to capture sufficient air mass flow of scramjet to provide sufficient thrust. A switched model is firstly established with respect to different flight envelop, and the actuator fault and backlash nonlinearity are considered. In order to avoid the control discontinuity or oscillation caused by the sudden change of switching signal. An adaptive fault-tolerant controller based on barrier Lyapunov function is then designed to steer velocity and altitude tracking errors into predefined arbitrarily small residual sets, wherein the effects of actuator fault and backlash nonlinearity are compensated successfully by estimating their upper bounds. Different from other existing switching control strategies, the proposed controller does not contain switching information. Simulations on the switched model are carried out to prove the effectiveness of the designed controller.