Self-repairing control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicle with actuator fault and backlash

Abstract In this article, self-repairing control is formulated for the longitudinal dynamics of flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHVs) subject to a lumped effect of external disturbances, parametric uncertainties, actuator faults and backlash nonlinearities. Auxiliary systems are initially constructed to tackle the effects of magnitude constrain on actuators, which can modify the reference trajectories dynamically when actuators become saturated. Furthermore, fuzzy observers (FOs) are utilized to compensate the lumped obstacles online, which can rapidly render the disturbance estimate errors convergent. Sliding mode (SM) controllers based on FOs are sequentially designed, the selected SM laws can ensure the controllers are smooth and differentiable with minimal chattering. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed via Lyapunov theory. In the end, numerical simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the design scheme.