The paper describes the design of a fault-tolerant control scheme for an uncertain model of a hypersonic reentry vehicle subject to actuator faults. In order to improve superior transient performances for state tracking, the proposed method relies on a back-stepping sliding mode controller combined with an adaptive disturbance observer and a reference vector generator. This structure allows for a faster response and reduces the overshoots compared to linear conventional disturbance observers based sliding mode controller. Robust stability and performance guarantees of the overall closed-loop system are obtained using Lyapunov theory. Finally, numerical simulations results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
