International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design a robust control scheme to achieve robust tracking of velocity and altitude commands for a general hypersonic vehicle (HSV) in the presence of parameter variations and external disturbances.

Design/methodology/approach – The robust control scheme is composed of nonsingular terminal sliding mode control (NTSMC), super twisting control algorithm (STC) and recurrent neural network (RNN). First, by combing a novel NTSMC and STC algorithm, a second order NTSMC approach for HSV is proposed to provide fast, continuous and high precision tracking control. Second to relax the requirements for the bounds of the lumped uncertainties in control design, a RNN disturbance observer is presented to increase the robustness of the control system. The weights of RNN are updated by adaptive laws based on Lyapunov theorem, thus the closed-loop stability can be guaranteed.

Findings – Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective, leading to promising performance.

Originality/value – The main contributions of this work are: first, both parameter variations and external disturbances are considered in control design for the longitudinal dynamic model of HSV; and second, the proposed controller can remove chattering and achieve more favorable tracking performances than conventional sliding mode control.