Command Tracking Control System Design and Evaluation for Hypersonic Reentry Vehicles Driven by A Reaction Control System

The paper addresses the command-tracking-control-system (CTCS) design problem for plants involving continuous and discrete control input simultaneously. A novel approach based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) is proposed and demonstrated to the angle-of-attack (AOA) CTCS of hypersonic reentry vehicle (HRV) driven by a hybrid actuator composed of aerosurfaces and reaction control system (RCS). Firstly, the longitudinal nonlinear dynamics model of HRV and the mathematical model of RCS are established, and then the model of the hybrid actuator is described. Secondly, a general command tracking problem is converted to a regulation problem by constructing a deviation system. And the characteristics of the hybrid actuator is considered and modeled definitely based on some modified sector conditions. Then, the CTCS with hybrid actuator is designed by solving a LMIs-based convex optimization problem. Furthermore, the stability performance of the closed-loop CTCS is evaluated and the formulation of the domain of attraction is derived. And the relationship between the size of stability domain and the magnitude of reference command is also discussed. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to the AOA-CTCS of HRV driven by aerosurfaces and RCS, and different sizes and locations of the stability regions are illustrated with different magnitudes of AOA reference command. Validation simulations are carried out by using the longitudinal nonlinear dynamics models of HRV. The research results demonstrate that the proposed LMIs-based approach is well suited for the AOA-CTCS design for HRV driven by aerosurfaces and RCS.