Flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle control based on a novel non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control and nonlinear disturbance observer

A new control scheme for flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicle is designed in this paper based on non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control and nonlinear disturbance observer. The proposed control scheme is derived from basic back-stepping method, which is capable of handling the higher-order nonlinear system, and a novel terminal sliding mode control method is designed for the last step to promise the finite time convergence and improve the steady-state precision. Meanwhile, a command filter is used to avoid the “explosion of complexity” in traditional back-stepping method. To overcome inevitable uncertainties as well as cross couplings between flexible and rigid modes, NDO is introduced to estimate diverse uncertainties. Thus flexible modes and uncertainties can be suppressed simultaneously. The convergence of overall closed-loop system states is proved via Lyapunov analysis. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed control strategy.